A Look at Cybersquatting and the Need for Brand Protection
Like any medium, the Internet has its share of benefits and risks for companies engaging in commerce online. On one hand it offers a myriad of opportunities for companies and organizations to market their brands effectively and successfully, like social networking, auction sites, email, blogs, to name a few. On the other hand, it throws open a world of possibilities for criminals to misuse it for personal gains. The most common methods employed by criminals to take advantage of companies’ hard earned brand reputations and brand equity include piracy, phishing, cybersquatting, malware, domain kiting, search engine manipulation, traffic diversion, false association, pay per click scams, framing, parody sites, negative newsgroup postings, counterfeit, gripe sites and others. Of the above-mentioned techniques, cybersquatting is the most widely used tactic employed by cyber criminals to deceive companies and online users alike.
What Is Cybersquatting?
Cybersquatting, or domain squatting, is defined as “registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else.” Cybersquatters employ different tactics to swindle money from business owners and entrepreneurs. Their most common tactic is to register a domain name similar to a popular brand and then put up offensive content about the company or the person thereby forcing them to buy the domain from them. The following are some of the techniques employed by cybersquatters:
- Renewal SnatchingDomain name registrations last only for a small period of time. Therefore, domain name owners need to reregister before the expiry date otherwise it can be purchased by anybody. Often owners forget to reregister their domain names, and this failure is put to good use by cybersquatters. They purchase domain names as soon as they become available and then sell them back to the owner at an exaggerated price.
- Name JackingAnother tactic is registering a domain name after the name of an individual who is running a successful business. If those interested in doing business with that particular person do research on that person on the Internet, they would be directed to the name jacked site. Name jacking is used typically to sell products that need few purchases to be profitable.
- TyposquattingAlso referred to as URL hijacking, this scheme takes advantage of the typos made by internet users when entering URLs. Cybersquatters register variants of a trademark, and, when a user accidentally enters a wrong address they are taken to the website owned by a cybersquatter.
How Does Cybersquatting Affect Business?
Most business owners and entrepreneurs are unaware of the serious effects of cybersquatting on their businesses. Through cybersquatting, customers are directed to competitors’ sites instead of the true site, which results in loss of revenue for the company. Sometimes customers are taken to sites selling counterfeited products thus causing irrevocable damage to their products’ brand value.
Cybersquatting is a real threat to companies, and therefore it is important that enterprises and organizations put in place effective measures for brand protection, one of which is brand protection software. Brand protection solutions can help companies closely monitor the online world for any illegal activities and can enable companies to take action before they can cause any real damage to their businesses.
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