Online Brands Face Threat From Cybersquatting

Criminals hacking online corporate brands and exploiting for monetary gains are escalating their efforts, according to a report released on April 30, 2007.

MarkMonitor, the company that supplies services for Internet brand protection to organizations said its newly formed "Brandjacking Index" revealed phishing, click fraud, false association and cybersquatting as major dangers. In cybersquatting illegitimate sites unlawfully seize well-known trademarks.

After completing a survey of public web sites for four weeks ending early April 2007, cybersquatting emerged as the most serious threat to brands. Phishing, which involves crafty e-mails sent out to entice recipients into giving out passwords, credit card numbers and other personal identities, is on the rise. Also domain "kiting" - the quick registering and circulating of similarly appearing Web site names too has increased.

The study monitored 134 million public web records that determined the top 25 brands in the world. It also determined popular brands from eight industrial groups including apparel, food, autos and high tech.

The illegal use of a popular brand name in any domain, called cybersquatting is the most-happening type of brand name exploitation. There were about 275,000 such cases in March 2006.

Click fraud involving diversion of consumers by fake pay-per-click ads occurred 50,743 times. There were 21,093 cases of e-commerce fraud and 11,015 times of kiting. These statistics have emerged from the four-week average for every single brand.

According to MarkMonitor data, phishing incidents grew in Q1 2007 by 104% over 2006. phishing attacks targeting financial services companies was 41% of total phishing attacks in Q1 2007 against 29.4% in Q1 2006.

Frederick Felman, chief marketing officer at MarkMonitor said all forms of online abuse starts with cybersquatting. It also leads to search marketing tactics that divert traffic from well-known Web sites. ZDNet reported this on April 30, 2007.

Brand holders encounter dual problems. While the volume of abuses is large, the abusers are getting familiar about marketing, Felman said.

As per MarkMonitor cybersquatting targets mostly media and Internet campaigns while kiting and phishing target banks and financial services companies.

Related article: Online Card Fraud Shows Greater Tendency Than Chip and Pin

» SPAMfighter News - 5/7/2007