Most businesses know the importance of protecting a brand. But, only a few of them understand that protecting their online properties is just as central to their brand-protection strategies.

Domains are important assets that an organization can own. They are crucial across many aspects, such as online marketing and other revenue-generating projects. As such, domain brand protection should be fully integrated into any organization’s strategy.

In this post, we will look at why securing one’s domain to protect a brand is necessary and what domain brand protection solutions brand owners and protection agents can use.

Securing Your Domain Means Protecting Your Brand

The domain reputation of online business can make or break its brand. As such, it is necessary for companies to come up with domain and brand protection strategies that include:

• Ensuring that their domains will not fall into someone else’s hands. Forgetting to renew domains can lead to their loss and so it is standard practice to register them for the maximum period allowed.
• Consider trends such as the use of new generic top-level domains (ngTLDs) and protect their domain from cybersquatters and other attackers that might rely on these.
• Create new business opportunities by creating country- or language-specific pages that sport country-code TLDs (ccTLDs).

Brand protection should start as soon as a company chooses its domain name and continue as long as its products and services exist. One slipup can cause them to suffer dire consequences. Whatever strategies they come up with can be matched with tools to help them meet their goals.

Domain and Brand Protection Solutions

Companies have various tools to choose from when it comes to domain and brand protection. These should allow them to enable proactive protection. Some examples are:

Domain Research Suite

The Domain Research Suite comprises a host of WHOIS-powered domain research and monitoring tools that help companies protect their brands. WHOIS History Search, for instance, can aid brand managers in identifying the current and past owners of a domain and dig deep into its history for more information. While looking to purchase the right home for a new product, for example, users can check the domain’s past owners to make sure none of them had ties to attacks that may put their brand at risk, such as finding out the domain is blocked after the product’s launch.

Brand owners and protection agents can also use Brand Monitor to list down potential domains with which trademark infringers can negatively affect their reputation. They can monitor these so they can receive alerts about ownership and other WHOIS record-related changes. If a domain name that very closely resembles theirs becomes available for purchase, they can opt to purchase it to makes sure it doesn’t fall into a potential cybercriminal’s hands.

IP Geolocation API

Brand owners and protection agents can also use IP Geolocation API to identify traffic sources. With it, they can separate good (from legitimate customers and clients) from bad (from attackers) traffic. They can analyze where customers come from and focus on regions or industries that contribute to their revenue. They can also keep cybercriminals and threat actors out of their networks by blocking proven malicious IP addresses identified in blocklists.

Website Categorization & Contacts

Our Website Categorization and Website Contacts products can help brand owners and brand protection agents gather information on the fly concerning websites of interest and the people behind them. By just inputting a domain name, they can quickly check if a website pertains to the expected categories and see the currently displaying meta information, company name, and country code for more information. Deviations from what can be found elsewhere might be indicative of misinformation. Trademark owners can also check whether all websites sporting their brand names or close variations of them are currently infringing their rights by comparing website categories with trademark classes and filter those that do so using a website categorization API‘s capabilities.

Domain Reputation API

Finally, Domain Reputation API makes it easy for brand managers and protection agents to identify if potential partners are reputable. They can use it to gauge the security of third-party domains. They need to use the domain name as a search term, and the tool returns results that include the domain’s reputation score. It also tells them if the domain has gaping vulnerabilities that, when exploited, can put their brand, should they choose to go ahead with the partnership, at risk.

Brand owners may also find it useful to work this API using their own domains as inputs to reveal possible unattended server configuration issues and malicious exploits as well as to make sure that their online properties are not blacklisted for some reason.

WHOIS records contain tons of information that can beef up any company’s domain and brand protection strategy. By keeping your domain safe from threats using domain and brand protection solutions, you also protect your brand and, ultimately, your bottom line.