Evidence Best Practice Guidelines

When reporting malicious activity to third-party vendors, they will request particular information related to the activity so that the suspicious site, domain, or similar can be removed. The following sections describe the documentation and information vendors will request to remediate malicious activity.

Evidence required by vendors for remediation

These tables describe the data required by vendors when reporting malicious activity as part of the remediation process. You can find more information about uploading trademarks and letters of authorization (LOA) in Preparing for Remediation. In general, remediations are more successful if you have provided both the company’s Registered Trademark and a signed Letter of Authorization (LOA) in Configurations.

Requirements for Exploitable Data, Data Leakage, Brand Security, or VIP takedown remediation

Requirements for Phishing (website and domain) takedown remediation

Request removal of a suspicious domain

To take down a domain, the registrars demand very specific evidence of malicious activity. This section shows you how!

Evidence can be uploaded in TXT, MSG, EML, or MBOX formats. Virus scans can be uploaded in PDF or TXT formats.

To request a takedown of a suspicious domain, the user must supply the original phishing email, sent from the suspicious domain, complete with the email headers (not simply a screenshot).

The header information provides the digital trail of the email and describes how the email passed from its origin to the user's mailbox. This serves the following purposes:

• Validate the legitimacy of the email (headers are very difficult to falsify).
• Provide some insight into if the email came from the domain listed or if it was spoofed.

Follow the instructions in the following sections to prepare evidence for uploading to the remediation request.

• To extract email headers from Gmail:
• To extract email headers from Outlook:
• To extract email headers from Apple Mail:
• To create a malware scan with VirusTotal:
• To create a malware scan with URLscan.io:

If proper evidence cannot be produced, see what other options are available at Additional Monitoring and Protection Steps.

To extract email headers from Gmail:

1. In Gmail, open the email message for which you want to extract the header.
2. In the top-right of the message, click More, then select Show original.
   
   A page with the email headers is displayed in a new tab or window:
   
3. Click Copy to clipboard (or highlight and copy everything), then paste into a searchable text editor.
4. Search (Ctrl-F) to ensure that the phishing domain is located in the pasted content.
5. Attach the pasted content to the takedown request as TXT, MSG, EML, or MBOX.
   Alternatively, click Download Original, and upload the downloaded EML file.

To extract email headers from Outlook:

1. Double-click the email message so it displays in a full window.

2. Display the Properties dialog in either of these ways:

   • From the email window, choose File > Properties.
   • From the email window, from the Tags section, click the small down-arrow:
     

   The Properties dialog is displayed:
   

3. Highlight, copy and, paste everything from the Internet headers section into a searchable text editor.

4. Search (Ctrl-F) to ensure that the phishing domain is located in the pasted content.

5. Attach the pasted content to the takedown request as TXT, MSG, EML, or MBOX.

To extract email headers from Apple Mail:

1. Open the email message in the macOS or OS X Mail reading pane or its window.
2. Choose View > Message > All Headers.
   The email header is displayed:
   
3. Highlight, copy and, paste everything from the Internet headers section into a searchable text editor.
4. Search to ensure that the phishing domain is located in the pasted content.
5. Attach the pasted content to the takedown request as TXT, MSG, EML, or MBOX.

To create a malware scan with VirusTotal:

1. Copy the domain name that you want to scan.

2. Visit https://www.virustotal.com/

3. Select the Search tab and paste the domain name:
   The domain scan is displayed, in which  you can verify if there is malicious activity:

   

4. Copy and paste the URL of the page, then upload that URL as evidence as a PDF or TXT file.

   

To create a malware scan with URLscan.io:

1. Copy the domain name you want to scan.

2. Visit https://urlscan.io/

3. Click Search and paste the domain name:

   

The domain scan is displayed, in which  you can verify if there is malicious activity:

 
1
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4. Copy and paste the URL of the page, then upload that URL as evidence as a PDF or TXT file.