In this age of cyberattacks and data breaches, it's not enough to protect access to sensitive company information. The smart, proactive move for any savvy owner or executive is to protect where his or her business lives online: a company's domain name (e.g., gunster.com).
As Gunster attorney David Bates recently wrote in the South Florida Business Journal, protecting your digital property is paramount to help ensure a hacker with an axe to grind doesn't obtain control of your domain name and wreak havoc by taking your website down, redirecting it elsewhere or for other nefarious purposes.
No. 1 on Bates' list of ways to protect access to your online presence is being selective about who at your company is listed in the domain name registration documents. Assigning employees or contractors to the roles of registrant, administrative contact or technical contact is a big no-no, he says.
He also discusses in the article the possibility of locking down your domain name, registering it as a trademark, and obtaining domain names similar to your own in an effort to preempt others' use of those names.
Read more about how you can protect control of your website: 8 steps for protecting your company's domain name (South Florida Business Journal, 8/17/15)
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