WebProNews reports that cyber phishing and brand hijacking are on the rise. The sad fact here is that these cyber fraud schemes are targeting smaller companies online than what they used to. It really means that no business is immune from attack, including yours. And I see this problem only growing worse.

There are really two sides of this issue. Phishing scams pray off the naivete of e-mail users. It used to be that the phishers would send out e-mail blasts to random users. Now they send out personalized e-mails to specific users of a particular site whose brand they are attempting to hijack – for instance, Amazon or eBay. This scams the e-mail user.

The second side of the scam involves the brand hijacking. The company whose brand is being hijacked is a victim in a way that the victim of the phishing e-mail is not. The phisher cons the e-mail user into divulging account details or personal information like credit cards but the brand loses credibility when the end user (the e-mail user who was scammed) views her victimization as being perpetrated by the brand that was hijacked.

It’s a two-victim crime. So how can you protect your brand from being a victim of cyber phishing and brand hijacking?

First, you’ve got to protect your site users’ personal information with vigilance. Always use secure firewalls and encryption for personal information being transmitted between you and your users. Secondly, conduct all financial transactions inside of a secure area of your site and take every precaution necessary to ensure phishers do not get their hands on your site users’ personal information.

Tags: brand hijacking, phishing, website security

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 7th, 2010 at 2:04 am and is filed under website development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.