Archive for the ‘Brand Abuse’ Category
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
It seems like every week, news of yet another high-profile domain hijacking occurs. Whether it’s stolen credentials, SQL injection attacks, or even the work of disgruntled employees, the number of incidents has been on the rise.
At the beginning of last year, MarkMonitor participated in VeriSign’s beta program to test server-level ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Domains, Security | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
MarkMonitor recently investigated to what extent popular product searches led to websites offering counterfeit and pirated goods via paid search ads. The research examined 20 of the top 1,000 product-related searches in 2008 and focused on paid search ads across the three major search engines – Google, Yahoo! and Bing. ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Counterfeit, Piracy | No Comments »
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
For retailers and consumers, Cyber Monday marked the beginning of the online holiday shopping season. For cybercriminals, however, it marked the opening of their winter phishing season.
Here at MarkMonitor, we are currently seeing an uptick in cybercriminal activity targeting online retailers’ brands. Linked here is an example of a phish attack ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Phishing, Security | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
You have to give scammers credit, as they are a creative bunch. While most of us think of the annual open enrollment period for employee benefits as a non-event, scammers see it as an opportunity.
Just last month we’ve seen suspicious sites targeting employees of some of the largest corporations. In ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Brandjacking, Phishing, Security | No Comments »
Friday, October 16th, 2009
It’s bad enough that malware is virally spread via paid search and social networking links. But now there are more accounts of it being spread via natural search links as well. In a practice called “SEO Poisoning,” fraudsters use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to mix malware-laden search results with ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Brandjacking, Security | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
Most brand owners are likely familiar with eBay’s Verified Rights Owner (VeRO) program for requesting de-listings of illegal auction listings and that eBay has a solid track record for removing infringing listings – close to 100%, in fact.
What may be lesser known is that many major online marketplaces – including ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Counterfeit, Piracy, Trademarks | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
For years, corporate domain name administrators have scoffed at every new second-level and third-level ccTLD liberalization, and rightly so. Until recently, most had continued the practice of registering significant numbers of variations, misspellings and typo-squats.
While I have never encouraged the practice of registering every variation in every geography, as this becomes ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Domains, ICANN, gTLDs | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
It may not be widely-known but the big 3 search engines – Google, Yahoo! and Bing – have established procedures for removing natural search results on the basis of the DMCA. That’s good news for brand owners: if consumers can’t find infringing websites via the search engines, they’re less likely to ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Brandjacking, Counterfeit, Piracy | No Comments »
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
Last week, MarkMonitor hosted a webinar with Internet Retailer and our guest speaker from 1-800-FLOWERS.COM on the topic of How to Reduce Traffic Diversion & Other Cyber Abuse. During the webinar, we polled audience members to gauge what their top challenge is in managing their brands online. We learned that ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Brandjacking | No Comments »
Friday, June 12th, 2009
Google recently made two noteworthy changes to its AdWords trademark policy, easing restrictions both in the U.S. and in 188 other geographies:
In the US: under “certain criteria,” an advertiser can use trademarks in its ad text even if the advertiser doesn’t own that trademark or have explicit approval from the ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Counterfeit, Gray Market, Trademarks | No Comments »
