Enterprises spend a great deal of time and money building their brand identity, and for good reason.
It's not only a primary component to an organization's marketing strategy but also a solemn promise made to customers, partners, and investors on the value of doing business with the organization.
And although focus groups, marketing collateral, and promotion initiatives are vital to building brand identity, many of those tactics are effectively countered—not just by competitors but also by the regular day-to-day activities of an organization's staff.
Brand-leaking
All types of organizations—from Fortune 100 to mom-and-pop operations—are susceptible to negative exposure each time an employee surfs the Web using company equipment.
It's an all-too-frequent occurrence. A check on WikiScanner, for example, shows that 86% of the Fortune 100 companies have had employees edit Wikipedia entries using the organization's network—with most of those entries having nothing to do with the corporation. Here are just a few entries that company staff members have edited:
- Lockheed Martin: Jenna Jameson, Beavis and Butt-Head, Jackass (the TV series), NCAA Football 08, Punk'd
- Northrop Grumman: America's Next Top Model, Arizona Cardinals, Final Fantasy XI, Happy Hour, PlayStation 3
- General Dynamics: 2007 Pacific-10 Conference Men's Basketball Tournament, Lethal Weapon 4, Marathon, Sandra Bullock, The Real World, Timeline of Christianity
- Humana: 2006 NFL season, Ferrari 360, Miami Dolphins
Furthermore, most often the person edited the Wikipedia entries as a guest rather than as a registered member; and although the employee is not identified, the company's IP address is. And so the brand's reputation is placed at risk.
That is just one example of how easy it is for an organization to become a victim of "brandjacking," whereby copyrights, trademarks, and intellectual properties are significantly compromised as a result of unintentional or malicious activities.
Today there are more than 1 billion IP addresses that have been collected and aggregated by nefarious websites, despite the fact that those organizations have mandated the use of anti-virus, anti-adware, anti-spam, firewall, and cookie-removal solutions for every employee workstation.
Other scenarios could involve a company's marketing team using the Web to research a competitor's online pricing or feature/function sets. Those actions, even when done outside work, can tip off a rival who can then counter such moves with the click of a mouse.
Taking Active Measures: Implementing Non-Attribution Systems
So, in addition to other initiatives, deploying non-attribution systems can help to proactively ensure a company's brand equity is protected. Those types of solutions mask a user's IP address, preventing anyone from determining the user's origin.
Such enterprise platforms provide many layers of capabilities that even today's most-sophisticated analytic tools would be unable to thwart. In addition, comprehensive non-attribution solutions support remote users as well as email and online chat applications.
Implementing those systems is fairly intuitive and turnkey, but a company must concern itself with these critical elements: (a) ensuring Internet and security policies are in place and cover all aspects of work-related and employee-related Web usage; and (b) ensuring the system you select offers the following features:
- Frequent rotation of IP addresses: The solution creates an unrecognizable pattern of Web-surfing activity by frequently changing the originator's IP address.
- IP-address diversity: IP addresses used for rotation are drawn from a highly diverse population and come from many different network blocks.
- Assurance of non-retention of records: Records of user activity are not retained or, at the very least, cannot be exploited by others as with most free open-source systems.
- Speed and usability: When online protection slows down users' surfing habits and techniques, users will turn it off or go around it and surf unprotected.
Taking the proactive measures described above will ensure continued protection as Internet counter-intelligence threats evolve.
Protecting Vital Resources
Brand identity is one of the most valuable assets, if not the most valuable asset, that all organizations—from healthcare providers to financial institutions—seek to protect, but the ease of employee access to the Internet from the office exposes the corporate network, which is your brand identity online, to every website your employee visits.
One way to circumvent that threat is to completely protect enterprise users' Internet identities through an identity-management Web-surfing system when the network connects to the virtual world.
