I helped write this white paper for MarkMonitor which looks at what they call “brandjacking” or using the Internet to hijack well-known brands for criminal uses. My focus for this report is on pharmaceutical brands. MarkMonitor identified the potential threats to the world’s strongest brands and tracked millions of emails and billions of web pages to determine that exploits of all types are increasing, and some such as domain kiting have more than tripled since earlier this year.

As long as consumers are motivated to shop for cheap drugs, unscrupulous online pharmacies will continue to proliferate and take their money, risking consumer health and financial well-being. Overall, brand abuse is increasing, but more important than the sheer volume is the rise in the level of sophistication and the use of best practices by online criminals and fraudsters. Along with the increasing complexity of attacks is a continued increase in the number of phishing attempts, the number of brands targeted and use of multiple attacks from single domains.

You can download my repor tfor MarkMonitor here.