Cybercrime Against Business On The Rise
By Anna Johnson on March 13th, 2009MarkMonitor’s recently released report, ‘Brandjacking Index: 2008 – The Year in Review,’ indicates that cybercrime against business grew substantially last year.
Cybersquatting (using a domain name that infringes someone’s trade mark) was the main abuse identified, rising 18 percent in 2008, after increasing by 33 percent the year before.
Other crimes identified in the report were click fraud – where pay-per-click ads are clicked in order to make the advertiser incur greater advertising costs – ‘typosquatting’ – in which domain name holders take advantage of miss-spelled domain names – and phishing, where hackers trick people into visiting fake versions of real sites.
Phishing is particularly insidious as it can directly harm consumers. Phishers are known for tricking people into providing their credit card details so they can steal their money.
The elephant in the room is, in my opinion, website hacking. Truth be known, most web servers are constantly under attack by would be hackers. All it takes is a failure to address a seemingly minor security loophole for a website to be compromised.
When a website is down for a few days, one day, or even a few hours… that costs businesses real money.
While you may not read about many high profile hack attacks, they probably happen more often than you think…
Source: Enid Burns, “Online Brand Abuse Escalates in 2008,” ClickZ, March 9, 2009
