Brand Abuse Monitoring

May 16, 2016
Online Brand Abuse - Brand Monitoring

Electronic channels are a highly efficient mechanism of delivering online services, capabilities and transacting with the end user customer presenting many favorable outcomes for the organisation as well as the end user. However, the electronic channel is open to range of abuse and fraud, ranging from benign to malicious activity.

The following is an outline of some challenges facing the business transacting online.

Online Brand Abuse varies from unintentional brand misuse to significant malicious intent, trademark infringement, intellectual property theft and corporate identity theft. Corporate branding can be readily hijacked for the purpose of delivering malicious payloads from a “trusted” source. Brand abuse can result in major reputational damage, dilution of the business message, corporate identity theft and monetary loss. The business needs to be aware of such issues and be proactive in terms of potential abuse.

The Organisation’s brands, including copyright, trademark and intellectual properties, are in the public domain — the internet. Brand infringements, abuse, and online content theft are common issues across the digital marketplaces.

Online brand abuse occurs across a range of electronic channels including email, IM, SMS, social media, mobile apps, domains, P2P networks, auction sites across all reaches of the online world.

Online Brand abuse varies from unintentional or unauthorised use of the brand through to;

significant malicious intent


trademark or copyright infringement


intellectual property theft


executive and corporate identity theft


corporate branding can be readily hijacked for the purpose of delivering malicious payloads from a “trusted” source

brand abuse can result in the following;


major reputational damage


dilution of the business marketing message


communicate of misinformation


fraud and financial losses


regulatory non-compliance or industry negligence

iZOOlogic Brand Monitoring Suites:

Download, FTP and distribution sitesSuch repositories are inspected for cases of brand abuse and malicious intent or distribution of brand content.

Torrents, P2P and alternative networksModern cybercrime is emerging to the deeper grey parts of the internet. Monitoring of P2P provides further insight to this deeper threatscape. It is becoming more common for malware to leverage alternative networks as well as for the distribution of Mobile Apps.

Grey marketsBrand Monitoring occurs via iZOOlogic systems and relationships with other niche vendors to provide brand alerts to prevent the trading and distributions of such things as applications, phishing kits or malware configuration files that are likely to be used against a client brand.

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