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Squatting again
Seems like the London mayoral election is the latest big name event to have been hijacked by cybersquatters – those pesky critters who buy up lucrative domains or near misspellings of them in the hope of monetising the site somehow, or just causing mischief. Yet, according to domain name management firm NetNames, Ken seems to be getting a rather rough ride on the world wide web.
Apparently domains such as ihatekenlivingston.org, and kenlivingstone.org are doing the rounds. The latter boasts a picture of the man himself dressed as a cowboy with the headline “Do you really want to pay for Ken Livingstone and his cronies?”. Sneak isn't sure why Boris has escaped relatively unscathed but imagines it must be something to do with the vigorous defensive registration activities his camp has been involved in. A total of ten other domains point back to his site backboris.com.
Cybersquatting or brandjacking is growing. According to a recent report brandjacking jumped up 33% last year.
Even security companies aren't immune. Content filtering company SmoothWall recently evicted brandjackers who have been 'cybersquatting’ the www.smoothwall.com domain for over three years! The brandjackers even built a site to deliberately mislead visitors, with links to related subjects such as network security, firewall software and anonymous surfing.
Posted by JD | June 20, 2008 4:10 PM