Importance of online brand

The ease & gigantic potential that the Internet provides to businesses to expand their reach amongst their customers and tap markets that traditionally would have required way too much effort & resources is definitely remarkable. Being present on the Web via their websites has become a cornerstone for businesses to create brand awareness, showcase their products & service and also for selling their offerings directly online. And with each passing day, people are beginning to rely more and more on this virtual presence of brands and are increasingly interacting with them.

Domain names to that effect have become a very critical component for expanding and building a brand identity online. And just like any valuable asset in plain sight, there are a lot of bad guys who either want to cause harm or exploit your brand’s potential for their own benefit. Which is of course not a great news for you!

What is online brand abuse?

The destruction caused by malicious entities against your domain name can cause damage to your brand reputation, bleed into customer trust, affect your organization's bottom line with counterfeit products, result in brand abuse, identify theft and intellectual property abuse, just to name a few.

Some of the ways in which these are carried out are:

1) CyberSquatting

This involves buying domain names which are associated with a popular company, brand, trademark or the name of a well-known person with the intent to profit from their reputation. In this case, the malicious entity can sell counterfeit products/ services pretending to be someone else thereby causing damage to the reputation of the brand. Though in most cases these domain names are purchased to be sold to the person or company who owns the trademark contained within the name at a much-inflated price.

2) Typosquatting

Typosquatting, on the other hand, is registering of domain names that look confusingly similar to your brand, with variations in the spelling or by using a different TLD. Often used for phishing attacks so as to lead people to fake websites or to distribute a malicious code. Besides this, it can also be used to generate advertising revenues, deviate traffic or get customer details unknowingly.

In such cases, the company can find a bad actor and pay them directly to buy the domain name. There are of course legal proceeding to procure the domain name too, but it takes up a lot of time and is costly. Many companies also defensively register similar spellings of their domain name but again it's not feasible to buy every variation of your brand name. Also with the launch of new gTLDs, this task has only become more difficult.

Faced with such a situation, it is no more feasible for companies to solely rely on traditional strategies to protect their brands and trademarks and tackle such unpleasant scenarios.

So you've built your business and your brand, now how do you protect it?

If you want to proactively keep your brand and trademark safe from such infringement, and are looking for optimal protection from fraudsters, you can count on the comprehensive solution provided by our Brand Monitoring Tool. Our Domain Name Trademark Monitoring Service uses AI driven predictive monitoring and tracks all domain name registrations globally for potential breaches against your valuable brand.

You can better protect your brand and detect malicious entities trying to leverage your reputation with our tool in the following ways:

Keyword Monitoring

Add & monitor keywords related to your brands and trademark in our easy-to-use online tool. Each day, WhoisXmlApi’s advanced system observes millions of existing domains for changes and detects more than hundreds of thousands of newly registered domains. With the best in class infrastructure, you can be assured of being notified of any new domain registrations or changes occurring on the web that could be related to your brand.

Predictive Domain Typo Finder

Get a predictive list of all the possible typos, misspellings & variations of your brand name or trademark & track them. Our sophisticated system identifies similarly named domains using various algorithms and finds all the deceptive entities who are pretending to be you. The AI driven predictive monitor provides a holistic typosquatting tracking coverage to your precious brand.

Advantages of Brand Monitoring Tool for proactively protecting your online assets

• Daily tracking of any changes in domains containing specific words, phrases, or partial words
• Discover any new domain name registrations, recently expired domains or even changes in the existing domain’s Whois records that include the monitored term
• Get up to 300 domain typo variation for a comprehensive list to catch violations
• Coverage includes gTLDs, new gTLDs, and ccTLDs
• You can blacklist terms by adding them as ‘Exclude’ in the domain's Whois record, so you can focus on the items that need your attention
• Get email alerts of any changes in the monitored terms, so you can stay updated.
• With just a single click directly investigate the discovered domain’s historic and current profile to learn more about the actors who registered them and their connected infrastructure
• The online tool displays records of changes for easy reference
• Quickly & easily integrate our Brand monitoring tools into your applications with API access.

Use Cases of Brand Monitoring Tool

Brand Monitoring Tool uses an industry leading online monitoring platform to look for registrations that match your trademarks, including close matches and typosquatting from the world’s largest database of domains. We’ve made domain name monitoring easier and more cost-efficient than ever.

Successful companies rely on our global web presence to build and strengthen their brands and prevent the following threats to their brands and trademarks:

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→ Combat Phishing Attacks

One of the largest cyber crime in today’s time, phishing attacks use slightly misspelled domain names of known popular brands for deception. Malicious entities use cleverly crafted emails claiming to be from your company to victimize your employees, customers, or even partners and try to obtain their financial or other confidential information be sending them to fake websites or sometimes even distribute malicious code.

→ Prevent Unethical Domain Parking

Brand owners can prevent exploitation by cyber squatters who purchase their registered trademarks in advance and hold onto them with the intent of selling the domain name in the future at inflated prices.

→ Battle Counterfeit Websites

The aim here is to imitate a brand owner’s actual website as precisely as possible, and then to successfully market counterfeit products, sometimes without the knowledge of the customer.

→ Prevent Copy-cat Brands from Tapping Your Traffic

Sometimes small businesses deliberately choose names that are similar or sometimes even identical to a well-known brands and try to leverage from their reputation. Also adopting an industry-leading brand name increases the likelihood of receiving more traffic without these copy cats actually earning it rightfully. It is the quickest and easiest way for an unknown company to get traffic to their website, where they sell their own company’s products.

→ Avert Unknown Promotion of Competitor’s Brand

Rival companies can register domain names using a variation of your brand to divert your customers away. This can result in lost traffic along with lower online revenue, and not to forget your competitor gaining your customers!

→ Avoid Damage to Brand Image

A variation of your domain name can be used to drive people who actually want to visit your website to a pornographic or another malicious web site. This can cause immense damage to your brand reputation.

→ Prevent Customer Data Breach

Cyber squatters sometimes create similar domain names and replicate a reputed brand so they can steal the visitor’s financial and personal information. This again can result in people losing faith in the brand even though the brand was not directly affiliated with the fake site.

→ Stop Wrongful Discrediting

Sometimes a disgruntled employee, a hater, an unsatisfied customer or even your competitor may create variations of your domain name with abusive or derogatory words to bring down your brand image and spread false news about your brand.

These are some of the important areas in which Brand Monitoring Tool can help prevent damage to your online brand. With the rise and innovation in attacks from bad actors, staying on top of their activities is a must for companies with an online presence.

Conclusion

With more than 300 million domains registered and thousands being added daily, your domain name is a valuable corporate asset and requires round-the-clock protection. With our best-in-class technology find existing and new domains that spoof your brand, trademark, product, organization or other names and carry out defensive or investigative actions against them.

Setup Brand Monitoring Tool which can be tailored to your needs to safely and effectively manage your valuable domain portfolios. Receive all the updates and monitoring alerts directly to your account & via email and stop worrying about brand-hijacking and start focusing on building your business. Rely on our global reach and expertise to safeguard your valuable brands from infringement.

Get started: https://domain-research-monitoring.whoisxmlapi.com/brand-monitor