Com Laude Watch – Avoiding large domain name portfolios whilst securing online brand protection

by Caitlin McLintock

It’s no secret that the digital landscape is plagued by threats, particularly in the form of domain names that mimic or impersonate brands. Fraudulent domain names that are being used in phishing attacks and to create fake websites pose a significant risk. These schemes can cause serious financial damage and jeopardise the integrity of your brands.

Uncontrolled, large domain name portfolios are not the solution

Bad actors typically register and use domain names that contain typos, misspelled versions, incorporate brand-specific terms or use alternative domain extensions (TLDs), to exploit brand associations. There are no limits to the “creativity” and we are definitely being kept on our toes.

However, the pro-active approach of defensively registering domain names in large scale is neither budget, nor time friendly. With more than 1,600 different top level domain name spaces, it is simply not cost-effective to register every conceivable variation of your brands. Your domain name portfolio should match you as a company, the markets you are engaged in, as well as your products and territories – overall aligned with your business strategy. The truth lies somewhere in between: right-sizing the own portfolio to avoid uncontrolled large domain name portfolios while watching the relevant domain names spaces for domain names that could target your brand. For both key strategies we provide you with our expertise and the right tools – Com Laude Watch being one of them.

Com Laude Watch – streamlined approach to protection

Com Laude Watch is our industry leading domain name monitoring solution designed to safeguard your brand’s online reputation. Watch scours the Internet for domain names that target your brand. We scan the space daily for over 380 million names, looking for both direct brand matches (for example brand.TLD, keyword-brand.TLD and bran-d.TLD) and domain names that contain typographic variants and non-standard homoglyphs. It allows you to

• detect trademark infringements in the domain name space
• know if and how your brand is being (ab)used online
• protect your web traffic
• identify domain names that could harm your brand, because they are, for example, used to host websites which offer counterfeit products / impersonate your brand / resolve to pay-per-click advertising / divert Internet users to competitors, offering competing products / used for protest sites etc.

To ensure efficiency and cost-effectiveness, Com Laude Watch doesn’t burden you with voluminous spreadsheets or daily emails. Instead, it streamlines your online brand protection process by delivering intuitive, secure reports that pinpoint the most critical threats, allowing you to allocate your time and resources strategically. Com Laude Watch

• Filters out false positives
• Estimates the potential threat of the identified domain names
• Reports the results to you through our intuitive and secure Com Laude Portal

The unique AI-powered ranking methodology allows you to understand the results and focus on the most important threats to your brand – saving you time and money.

Com Laude Watch features unrivalled coverage of all the major generic top level domain (gTLD) name spaces. Furthermore, it provides the flexibility to monitor a diverse selection of country-code domain name spaces, catering to your specific needs and offering you unparalleled brand surveillance.

If you would like to hear more about out domain name monitoring tool, please feel free to reach out to our Brand Protection team directly and arrange a demo of the system: brandprotection@comlaude.com.

If you are also keen to learn more about right-sizing your portfolio you can read about our Intelligence tool here.