* VeriSign’s Brand and Fraud Detection Service
How much business is your Web site losing to cybersquatters, typos, logo misuse and other online threats? VeriSign says it can help companies find, prioritize and resolve these threats quicker with a new service that will be available in November.
VeriSign’s Brand and Fraud Detection Service will be available to customers of its Digital Brand Management Services through its Digital Brand Manager portal.
VeriSign’s fraud detection service features a Web crawling service that looks for cybersquatters on domain names with company or product names or common misspellings of those names. It also looks for logo infringement or slanderous information about companies or brands on Web sites and blogs.
In the past, VeriSign worked with Cyveillance for online risk monitoring and management. Now VeriSign is offering its own service that takes advantage of its expertise in operating the .com and .net registries and providing Web site security services.
“We are leveraging a lot of our unique data sources from our security business and our global visibility into DNS traffic to help our customers track infractions worldwide,” says Mike Denning, vice president and general manager of VeriSign Digital Brand Management Services. “We provide a holistic picture of how people are attacking you online. We have real-time reporting.”
For example, VeriSign analyzes DNS traffic and cybersquatter activity to identify phishing attacks.
“Seventy percent of phishing attacks have some sort of company brand in the domain name, so that’s a real good indicator of fraudulent behavior about to happen,” Denning says.
Cybersquatters also mean lost hits and revenue. For example, VeriSign analyzed its own domain name portfolio and bought eight additional domain names based on misspellings of its security brand names. The company reaped $60,000 in sales of its SSL certificates from those new domain names in just six months.
“There’s a lot of value in direct navigation traffic” where the user types in a company or brand name, Denning explains. “It’s a logical choice for a brand to capture the misspellings because they can convert that to revenue at a higher rate. There’s a lot of that traffic being diverted. If you register names with typos, you can drive back that traffic to where you can monetize it vs. a pay-per-click site monetizing it.”
The fraud detection service is the latest in a series of new offerings that VeriSign is marketing to companies that manage large portfolios of domain names.
In September, VeriSign launched Version 8.1 of its Digital Brand Manager portal. The portal features a new visualization tool that allows companies to look at their domain name portfolios geographically, on a country-by-country basis, to ensure that their brands are protected everywhere they do business.
VeriSign also integrated two of its services – domain name management and hosted DNS services – under its portal. Among the companies that are taking advantage of both services is Novozymes A/S, a Denmark biotech firm with 700 products that does business in 130 countries.
“With the new interface and features in the Digital Brand Manager, we’re able to easily find what domain names are receiving the most traffic and prioritize which domain names deliver the most customers,” Claus Michael Anderson, legal counsel for Novozymes A/S, said in a statement.
VeriSign has 1,700 customers of its Digital Brand Management Services. Most of these customers manage 1,000 to 10,000 names that protect company and product names in various top-level domains, such as .com and .net, as well as country codes and foreign languages.
“We just crossed the milestone of having 100 million domain names worldwide,” Denning says. “Communication, content and commerce continue to move online. Domain names continue to be a central part of the identity that companies need to protect and secure.”
