Brand-jacking – "impersonating" a brand and taking advantage of its trusted reputation to advance another agenda – is one of the brand owner's worst nightmares.  Now, Internet-age scammers are using ever more sophisticated online tools to attack and abuse brands.

What's in a brand name? For brands big and small – their entire reputation, their consumers' trust accumulated over the years. But especially for top players (consultant Interbrand has estimated that the top 100 global brands have a combined value of $1.2 trillion), brand is everything. And ironically, when counterfeiters and conmen ride on the back of a brand's name and fame, the brand becomes a victim of its own success.

It's called brand-jacking, and it's nothing new. In the recent past, No Logo author Naomi Klein pushed to hijack global brands' high visibility and use it against them to raise awareness of social issues. More recently, most-counterfeited-brand Louis Vuitton fell victim to brand-jacking when artist Nadia Plesner created an image of an impoverished Darfur child holding a Louis Vuitton-like purse. Plesner pled genocide awareness; LV filed a lawsuit.

But now, as the Web continues to broaden, so has brand-jacking, with scammers coming up with ever more sophisticated ways o hurt both brand owners and consumers alike. MarkMonitor, a company that specializes in identifying and prioritizing online brand abuse, recently released its Brand-jacking Index 2008 and the numbers are not pretty:

• Almost half a million instances of brand abuse each week, including 402,882 accounts of cybersquatting (the registration of domain names with a brand, slogan or trademark to which the registrant has no right – how about guccifendi.com)
• Over 40,000 instances of abuse targeting media brands in the first quarter of 2008; 25,792 directed to automotive brands (a 99 percent increase since the same period in 2007)
• A 77 percent increase in brand-jacking incidents against food and beverage products, a 58 percent increase against apparel and a 33 percent increase against CPGs – highlighting the fact that brand-jackers continue to target more mainstream consumer goods
• Where can you find brand abusers? Anywhere in the world, but 66 percent of them call the US home, while 7 percent come from Germany, 6 percent from the UK and 4 percent from Canada.

What about brand-jacking tactics? Blog.zdnet.com poster Dancho Danchev, who's been monitoring brand-jacking incidents, summarized the most prevalent ones:

Cybersquatting's popularity is due to the availability of automatic domain registration software combined with an automated technique that can verify the domain's availability and purchase it without the brand owner knowing any better. Some cybersquatters have created domains that impersonate even the original brand's web application structure – and some have managed to brand-jack security software brands as well, such as McAfee. The reason for their success – some of the world's most popular brands do not have a proactive response strategy.

False Association happens when a consumer buys a product from a rogue software site, comforted by "recommendations" by top industry monitoring services and the "safety and privacy" banners on the site. What the consumer may not know is that only legitimate sites have banners that he or she can click on and receive a response; bogus sites have no external links.

Phishing, already a popular scamming technique with its ability to reach everyone everywhere, continues to grow, with attacks against auction brands comprising 60 percent of phishing incidents and the numbers of organizations phished in the last year rising by eight percent. The MarkMonitor report also revealed that 14 organizations account for 90 percent of all phishing URLs (banks and financial services continue to be the most phished business with 12 out of the 14 most-phished brands), and that the US is host to 34 percent of phishing sites as of the beginning of 2008.

That's not all. According to an article by Steve Mollman for CNN.com, phishing has extended its tentacles with new variations, including vishing (a new tactic that takes advantage of automated dialing systems and the sense of assurance provided by landline phone services) and smishing (scams appearing as text messages).

What can brand owners do? Because there are so many ways to jack a brand online and it's impossible to track all of them, many companies are looking to organizations such as Mark Monitor, Brand Intelligence and Net Enforcers – leaders in intellectual property monitoring who help companies regain control of their brand identity and reputation.

Brands whose reputations have been tarnished can also take aggressive legal action. Prosecution by financial services companies is said to be helping lower the overall number of attacks in that sector.

As in any battle, unprotected assets will be the most vulnerable. So the most effective solution for companies is probably raising awareness of brand-jacking activities and marshalling their legal, intelligence and marketing resources to aggressively defend their brands.