SIDNEY, N.Y. -
Indeed, this far-reaching exposure delivers no payoff for many credit unions, according to Noel Goodspeed, chief information officer at the community-based Sidney FCU (SFCU) here.
"Frankly, we don't want the world to see our web presence," said Goodspeed.
"Our membership resides in a three-county area, so there's no advantage for us to advertise on an international basis," he explained. "With a website, we get all the risk of international exposure but no benefit, except for our few traveling or remote members."
Community and SEG-based CUs stick out like sore URLs, according to MarkMonitor, a San Francisco-based company that offers enterprise brand protection.
"Because credit unions typically have a well-defined membership, they can more easily be targeted by fraudsters," claimed Frederick Felman, chief marketing officer, MarkMonitor.
But Sidney FCU believes that a website just wouldn't serve its purpose if it were roped-off to members only, so the $250-million continues to operate online in order to better serve its existing and potential members.
That means the CU also has to maintain an extensive line of defense against all sorts of crime online.
Phishing is the most infamous of the online threats, but it's only one many types of fraud crimes categorized as "cybersquatting," or the unauthorized use of a brand name in a domain.
Cybersquatters also include online "kiters," who primarily target financial services institutions, according to MarkMonitor. Kiters are fleeting cybersquatters who take advantage of the six-day free trial period for web domains offered by many Internet Service Providers.
Kiters take the free domains and commit pay-per-click (PPC) fraud: The kiter puts up a webpage that may contain links to financial institutions and then gets paid every time someone clicks on one of the links. If the getting is good, the kiter may pay for the domain and stay, but most often, the kiter moves on to another free trial.
"Credit unions should expect to see kiters floating variations of their brand names to host PPC and other traffic-diversion scams," Felman said. "Kiters' motivation is to collect advertising revenue and pay-for-performance referral fees as a result."
Goodspeed concurred: "We've got hundreds of cybersquatters using our name in their domain registrations, who are just looking to use our brand for click-through revenue."
He pulled out a recent tracking report and counted more than 40 separate domains that unlawfully used the SFCU brand in one day.
Cybersquatters aren't merely a nuisance, continued Felman. "Cybersquatting translates into lower consumer confidence, with the potential to negatively impact efforts to entice credit union customers," said Felman. "It's a driver leading to other abuses that further degrade brand value, customer loyalty and revenues."
Sidney FCU partnered with MarkMonitor two years ago to help foil a phishing attack, but the CU soon used the solution to track brand abuse online. That way, Sidney FCU stays on top of "very concerning" instances that could lead to phishing or gross misrepresentation of the brand, Goodspeed said.
The MarkMonitor service is far more "scientific" than Sidney's previous manual efforts to patrol the Net, said Goodspeed. MarkMonitor searches approximately 134-million public records daily for brand abuse.
Beyond scanning the Net for abuse, there's not a lot a CU can do about the cybersquatting swarm, he said.
"If something of concern happened, we would take action to shut down the site," Goodspeed said. "But to try to shut down all of these guys would be like chasing your tail. Nine times out of 10 these kiters go away in a day or so."
Prevention helps, Felman added. "We've found that organizations that defend themselves make themselves far less interesting to phishers and other brandjackers."
more
Read more about online fraud at cujournal.com and search the following bolded terms in the archive:
* Bewear. Bware. Beware. The Typosquatters
* 'Pretty Scary' Security Threats Coming
* Company Predicts Its Anti-Phishing Solution Will 'Dominate'
For info on this story:
* www.sfcuonline.com
* www.markmonitor.com
