|
I receive spam on a daily basis from various Banks… as well as mine. None are legitimate but actually, that is not what is catching my attention receiving spam. There is something else and it deals with stealing information from me.
Creating a personalized “.brand” domain name extension allows avoiding all that.
Bank Emails
Many are familiar with receiving spam through phishing attempts to have you answering an email and providing personal information such as login and passwords: most of the time receivers know that they should not answer emails from any Banks since most offer to communicate with them from their online portal. This one is easy to avoid.
Another standard is to receive an email asking you to click on a link. Such spams are also standard phishing attempts trying to steal login and password from you on a fake website looking like the one from your Bank.
Answering the email to a person using a personalized domain name extension such as the one from your Bank CANNOT be faked.
When answering the email, the domain name extension to appear in the “To” field” cannot be faked using a homoglyph or a letter looking similar to a standard domain name extension such as a country code top-level domain or a generic one. The reason for this is simple:
Emails ending with a “.brand” are seals, certifying that the answer will go to the right initial sender. When using a country code extension of a generic one such as a “.com”, anyone can create what comes before the extension and, for example, change a letter from one to another: do you think that WhateverTrademark.com is very different from WhateverTradenark.com? Who will notice when answering an email ending in [email protected]?
Bank surveys
Banks surveys are a new problem that I have identified. These are often legitimate and my Bank sends me surveys to check if I am satisfied with their service. The problem with such surveys is that they use the email and domain name from another service provider, asking me to answer questions on a website using either a “.com” or a “.fr” domain name which is not the one from my Bank. That is where I see a problem: how to ensure that these are legitimate? By trusting the person who sends the email? By trusting that website asking me questions? No way.
A personalized domain name extension offers this new opportunity to drastically increase the level of trust:
If it remains the job of specific companies to create the right surveys for Banks, having them hosted on a Bank’s website operating its own personalized domain name extension is an easy thing to do: if this can be done on sub-domains, then it can easily be hosted on a “.brand” domain name. Companies offering survey services are probably already offering such services… but not in France apparently. Note that in these cases, external survey companies will deal with your data anyway but if hosted behind a “.brand” extension, it won’t look like.
Size matters
The debate is a funny one when discussing “what a good domain name is”, and most of the time, you will hear that “the shorter, the better”.
I strongly disagree with this for “.brand” domain name extensions since a Trademark wants to be noticed and when it comes to infringements, a Trademark wants to ensure that a client is talking to the right person when answering an email: the longer its domain extension will be, the higher the possibility will be to notice the name is different from a “.com”. That is also what “.brand” domain name extensions offer: the possibility to highly notice a sign when offering a client to visit a website. Look at https://www.miami.lamborghini/ : such website just cannot be a fake one, and neither is receiving an email from them. The longer, the better.
The future is worth
Homographic attacks are an increasing risk for Banks and other Trademarks: these attacks increase unfortunately and they are harder to detect by final consumers (those to receive bank emails). To make it simple, a letter used in the domain name will look similar to the one used in a standard ASCII alphabet: can you make the difference between this “a” and this “?”? Well, there is one and you probably won’t check this when answering an email or navigating to a website using such letters.
The risk is very high here since the use of these letters exists in various domain name extensions offered to the general public. When using a “.brand” domain name extension, the risk to visit another website or answer an email to the wrong person ceases to exist since the “.brand” extension is the seal: you cannot create or add a different letter to a domain name extension… unless you have the patience to wait for the next round of ICANN applications to new gTLDs, and $185000.
An alternative for Banks
I see two alternatives for Banks who won’t be interested in creating their “.brand” new gTLD:
Just in case I forget…when choosing a domain name extension, don’t forget to check if the extension is not similar to another one.
Sponsored byVerisign
Sponsored byIPv4.Global
Sponsored byRadix
Sponsored byWhoisXML API
Sponsored byCSC
Sponsored byDNIB.com
Sponsored byVerisign