There is every possibility that new-dimensional security issues will accompany new generic top-level domains (gTLDs), hence, you should be well prepared to protect your domain. If you want to defeat cyber criminals, who are always coming up with new ideas to compromise the system, the steps below are very essential for you.
Cyber criminals can damage your brand’s image by registering it with the .sucks extension which will give a negative image to the brand. They can also register your brand and use the site to collect your customers’ personal information, such as usernames and passwords, in order to dupe them. This criminal act is referred to as phishing and it is one of the greatest threats to the internet. They can also create a dummy of your brand using the .cheap extension and use it to generate a lot of revenue which ordinarily should have been yours.
Securing your new gTLDs is very important and one of the ways of doing so is to register a trademark for your brand and then register the trademark with ICANN’s Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH). The TMCH is ICANN’s global trademark database and it is intended to accept as well as authenticate rights information and promote both trademark claims together with sunrise services. Once your trademark is registered with the TMCH, you will have an upper hand in registering domains related to it, before the process is opened to the public. You will also be informed whenever anybody wants to register a name related to your trademark. It is important to note that the TMCH is not intended to fight your trademark battle for you, but to assist you in enforcing your right.
In addition, you should ensure that you register multiple domains for a website. This will protect it from cybersquatters who love to create variations of popular websites so that they can benefit from their popularity. When visitors mis-type the spellings of the popular sites, they eventually end up at these variations. Hence, if you create these variations yourself, you have nothing to worry about. But if you allow cyber thieves to register the variations before you do so, there may be fire on the mountain. Also, your registration should be set to auto-renewal so that the renewal process is made simpler and the possibility of losing your domain names is eliminated. The security of your domain names is very important and you should take every necessary step to ensure that you achieve the highest security level possible.
