Beating the brandjackers: book launch

A new book that provides practical advice to businesses at risk of online attacks such as 'cybersquatting' has been published.

Countering Brandjacking in the Digital Age is authored by Simeon Keates, professor in engineering at Greenwich University in the UK, and Christopher Hofman of the European Domain Centre (EDC), a registrar specialising in protecting business domain names.

The 87-page book draws on examples of best practice in the fields of risk management, interaction design and engineering design, and contains 'real-world' examples and interviews with a number of brand-owning organisations ranging from small companies to large multinationals.

"The Internet gives companies the opportunity to increase brand recognition, and with it business," says Keates.  "But there is also the chance for unscrupulous individuals to attack these brands, be it for personal gain, illicit purposes or malice."

The publication of the book is timely given the recent expansion of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) from the 22 commonly-used at present - including .com, .net and .org - to include a broad range of other gTLDs.

The release of more than 1,000 new gTLDS - which include locations such as .london or business and product categories such as .coffee or .pharmacy - is only making online brand security a tougher proposition.

"Cybersquatting, where someone registers a domain name with the aim of selling it back to the company or redirecting people to alternative products, is a big problem," according to Keates, who believes smaller operations with premium products - such as headphone or audio equipment manufacturers - are particularly vulnerable to online attacks.

"A slight tweak of the website name could send people to a different site which sells counterfeit versions of the goods but for similar prices," he notes.

"Smaller companies typically don't have the capacity or expertise to protect against this so in the book we’ve pointed out what they should be looking out for and protecting against."