DOMAIN NAME PROTECTION
DEFENDING YOUR BRAND TURF ONLINE
The bad guys are developing their tactics as quickly as the online world is growing, but the good news is that online brand monitoring tools are getting better, says Susan Prosser.
In a world that is increasingly interconnected by the day, brand managers must have a global perspective, whether they like it or not. Any business that is online, and any brand that has an online footprint, is global by defi nition. And that means online brand protection has to extend beyond the borders of one’s local jurisdiction. In other words, it has to scale.
Most online brand abuse starts at the domain name level: cybersquatting, ‘spear fi shing’ from typosquatted domains, and fraudulent e-commerce sites are all enabled by leveraging your valuable brand equity against that of your own clients and employees at the domain name system (DNS) level. Defending your brand globally in the DNS is at the core of any successful brand protection strategy.
Pundits like to talk about how most online malfeasance happens in .com. T at of course will always be true because of the relative size of the .com top-level domain (TLD). But the fastest growing threats are actually in the country code TLD (ccTLD) space, specifi cally those ccTLDs that lend themselves to abuse. Some TLDs off er free or very cheap domain registrations; others have legal frameworks that are friendlier to cybercrime; others simply turn a blind eye. Abusive domain registration patterns indicate that the bad guys are starting to fi gure out which TLDs are the most fertile for their nefarious activity.
So how do you fi ght back?
T e good news is that online brand monitoring tools are getting better. T e fi rst task is to choose
32 World Intellectual Property Review Annual 2013
which brand strings to set alerts on. T ere are a number of good typo-generation tools in the market that will show brand managers the common typos of their brand strings. Start by making a thorough list of what you want to monitor. T is list should include all of your key brands, common word combinations with your brands and common typos of your brands.
T e next task is to choose the right monitoring service. T e most important challenge on the service provider side is simply knowing when a given ‘bad’ domain exists in the DNS. Certain large TLDs like .com and .net, as well as all the new generic TLDs, which will launch later this year, are all required to publish ‘zone fi les’ listing all the domains that have been registered in that TLD. T is makes brand monitoring a relatively
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