SAN FRANCISCO -- MarkMonitorR, the global leader in enterprise brand protection, today released the company's first Brandjacking Index(TM), a quarterly report that measures the effect of online threats to brands. The Brandjacking Index investigates trends, including drilled-down analysis of how the most popular brands are abused online and the industries in which abuse is causing the most damage. The report examines the ever-adaptive tactics of brandjackers such as cybersquatting, false association, pay-per-click (PPC) fraud, domain kiting, objectionable content, unauthorized sales channels and phishing.
The Brandjacking Index tracks the top 25 brands from the 2006 Top 100 Interbrand study plus additional Interbrand ranked companies for business segment analysis. The cornerstone of the Brandjacking Index is the volume of public data analyzed by MarkMonitor using the company's proprietary algorithms; no customer data or proprietary customer information was used to create the Brandjacking Index. MarkMonitor searches approximately 134 million public records daily for brand abuse in domain data and U.S. and international Patent and Trademark Office data.
The phishing data MarkMonitor analyzes is based on feeds and fraud broadcasting from leading international Internet Service Providers (ISPs), e-mail providers and other alliance partners. The company has scanned billions of Web pages since November 2004 and processes 16 million phishing e-mails daily. To create the first Brandjacking Index, MarkMonitor captured and analyzed weekly samples of data over the month of March 2006. Insights are based on an average of weekly samples of incidents.
"Fraud, counterfeiting and other abuses against brands are increasing in intensity and numbers as brands and businesses move online," said Rose Ryan, Research Analyst, IDC. "Protecting brand reputations, customer relationships and revenues from online abuses is becoming as important to enterprises as securing their networks, data and systems from Internet-borne threats."