Company type | Subsidiary |
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Founded | 1999 |
Founder |
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Headquarters | Boise, Idaho, USA |
Area served | Worldwide |
Products |
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Number of employees | 520 (2017) |
Parent |
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Website | www |
Markmonitor Inc. is an American software company founded in 1999. It develops software intended to protect corporate brands from Internet counterfeiting, fraud, piracy, and cybersquatting. MarkMonitor also develops and publishes reports on the prevalence of brand abuse on the Internet.
In November 2022, the company was acquired by Newfold Digital. [2]
Markmonitor was founded in 1999 [3] in Boise, Idaho [4] and its initial business as a service provider for the protection of corporate trademarks on the Internet. In 2000, it gained ICANN accreditation status for domain registration [5] and acquired a domain management business called AllDomains the following year. [6] [7]
In October 2010, Markmonitor acquired an anti-piracy company (DtecNet) [8] [9] [1] and was itself purchased by Thomson Reuters' Intellectual Property & Science business in July 2012. In 2016, the IP division of Reuters, including Markmonitor, was sold to two venture capital companies, under the new parent company Clarivate Analytics.
In 2022, Clarivate announced that Newfold Digital purchased its subsidiary. Backed by the Clearlake and Siris groups, Newfold is a web and commerce technology provider.
According to the Markmonitor web site, it has been publishing a report called the Brandjacking Index since 2007, to assess how Internet threats affect corresponding brands. [10] The company's annual report says that cybersquatting increased 18 percent in 2008 [11] and "phishing attacks" rose 36 percent in the first quarter of 2009. [12] [13]
In 2010, the company estimated that $200 billion in revenues is lost annually as a result of worldwide counterfeiting and piracy on the Internet. [8] The 2011 report said the company had identified 23,000 listings "for clones, suspected counterfeits, or gray market" versions of tablet computers [14] by 8,000 sellers. [15] [16] A 2011 opinion piece in Techdirt criticized the research methodology of Markmonitor's report. [17]
According to Markmonitor, it develops and markets brand protection software and services [18] to combat counterfeiting, piracy, cybersquatting and paid search scams in four categories; domain management, antifraud software, brand protection and antipiracy. [19] The Idaho Statesman reported that "Markmonitor safeguards more than half of the Fortune 100 brands". [4]
Markmonitor registers the domains and provides Whois lookup information for a variety of companies. These companies include:
Boise ( BOY-see, is the capital and most populous city in the U.S. state of Idaho and is the county seat of Ada County. As of the 2020 census, there were 235,684 people residing in the city. On the Boise River in southwestern Idaho, it is 41 miles east of the Oregon border and 110 miles north of the Nevada border. The downtown area's elevation is 2,704 feet above sea level.
In the Internet, a domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. Domain names are used in various networking contexts and for application-specific naming and addressing purposes. In general, a domain name identifies a network domain or an Internet Protocol (IP) resource, such as a personal computer used to access the Internet, or a server computer.
Phishing is a form of social engineering and a scam where attackers deceive people into revealing sensitive information or installing malware such as viruses, worms, adware, or ransomware. Phishing attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and often transparently mirror the site being targeted, allowing the attacker to observe everything while the victim navigates the site, and transverses any additional security boundaries with the victim. As of 2020, it is the most common type of cybercrime, with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reporting more incidents of phishing than any other type of cybercrime.
The Thomson Corporation was one of the world's largest information companies. It was established in 1989 following a merger between International Thomson Organization and Thomson Newspapers. In 2008, it purchased Reuters Group to form Thomson Reuters. The Thomson Corporation was active in financial services, healthcare sectors, law, science and technology research, as well as tax and accounting sectors. The company operated through five segments : Thomson Financial, Thomson Healthcare, Thomson Legal, Thomson Scientific and Thomson Tax & Accounting.
Micron Technology, Inc. is an American producer of computer memory and computer data storage including dynamic random-access memory, flash memory, and USB flash drives. It is headquartered in Boise, Idaho. Its consumer products, including the Ballistix line of memory modules, are marketed under the Crucial brand. Micron and Intel together created IM Flash Technologies, which produced NAND flash memory. It owned Lexar between 2006 and 2017.
.tk is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Tokelau, a territory of New Zealand in the South Pacific.
KTVB is a television station in Boise, Idaho, United States, affiliated with NBC and owned by Tegna Inc. The station's studios are located on West Fairview Avenue in Boise, and its transmitter is located on Deer Point in unincorporated Boise County. It is rebroadcast by KTFT-LD in Twin Falls, which airs KTVB programming with local advertising for the Magic Valley area from its transmitter on Flat Top Butte near Jerome, Idaho, and maintains a local sales office in Twin Falls.
Bodybuilding.com is an American online retailer based in Boise, Idaho, specializing in dietary supplements, sports supplements and bodybuilding supplements. The site also once had a highly popular forum section, which was shut down in September, 2024.
Ridley's Family Markets is a family-owned chain of grocery stores based in Jerome, Idaho, United States, with multiple locations around the Intermountain West.
Thomson Reuters Corporation is a Canadian-American multinational information conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and maintains its headquarters at 19 Duncan Street there.
Web.com is an American dot-com company that provides a website builder, along with website hosting, domain name registration, web development, and various digital marketing services. It serves as a partner for very small to small-sized businesses and entrepreneurs, assisting them in establishing and expanding their online presence.
KFXD is a commercial radio station, owned by Townsquare Media, which airs a rhythmic contemporary format branded as "Power 105.5". The station is licensed to serve Boise, Idaho.
Typosquatting, also called URL hijacking, a sting site, a cousin domain, or a fake URL, is a form of cybersquatting, and possibly brandjacking which relies on mistakes such as typos made by Internet users when inputting a website address into a web browser. A user accidentally entering an incorrect website address may be led to any URL, including an alternative website owned by a cybersquatter.
Counterfeit consumer goods—or counterfeit, fraudulent, and suspect items (CFSI)—are goods, often of inferior quality, made or sold under another's brand name without the brand owner's authorization. The colloquial terms knockoff or dupe (duplicate) are often used interchangeably with counterfeit, although their legal meanings are not identical.
Cybersquatting is the practice of registering, trafficking in, or using an Internet domain name, with a bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else.
Brandjacking is an activity whereby someone acquires or otherwise assumes the online identity of another entity for the purposes of acquiring that person's or business's brand equity. The term combines the notions of 'branding' and 'hijacking', and has been used since at least 2007 when it appeared in Business Week referencing the term used in a publication by the firm MarkMonitor. The tactic is often associated with use of individual and corporate identities on social media or Web 2.0 sites, as described in Quentin Langley's 2014 book Brandjack, and may be used alongside more conventional (offline) campaign activities.
Endurance International Group, Inc. (EIG), previously named BizLand, now part of Newfold Digital, was an IT services company specializing in web hosting. The company was founded in 1997 and headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, USA. In 2021 Endurance International Group merged with Web.com forming a new company, Newfold Digital. It is one of the Internet's largest webhosting providers, with a global market share of 3.5% according to W3Techs. The company was structured differently from other large hosting companies such as Rackspace, GoDaddy, or 1&1 Ionos. The company has grown its hosting and related business through numerous acquisitions.
The PROTECT IP Act was a proposed law with the stated goal of giving the US government and copyright holders additional tools to curb access to "rogue websites dedicated to the sale of infringing or counterfeit goods", especially those registered outside the U.S. The bill was introduced on May 12, 2011, by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and 11 bipartisan co-sponsors. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that implementation of the bill would cost the federal government $47 million through 2016, to cover enforcement costs and the hiring and training of 22 new special agents and 26 support staff. The Senate Judiciary Committee passed the bill, but Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) placed a hold on it.
Clarivate Plc is a British-American publicly traded analytics company that operates a collection of subscription-based services, in the areas of bibliometrics and scientometrics; business / market intelligence, and competitive profiling for pharmacy and biotech, patents, and regulatory compliance; trademark protection, and domain and brand protection. In the academy and the scientific community, Clarivate is known for being the company that calculates the impact factor, using data from its Web of Science product family, that also includes services/applications such as Publons, EndNote, EndNote Click, and ScholarOne. Its other product families are Cortellis, DRG, CPA Global, Derwent, CompuMark, and Darts-ip, and also the various ProQuest products and services.
DDoS-Guard is a Russian Internet infrastructure company which provides DDoS protection and web hosting services. Researchers and journalists have alleged that many of DDoS-Guard's clients are engaged in criminal activity, and investigative reporter Brian Krebs reported in January 2021 that a "vast number" of the websites hosted by DDoS-Guard are "phishing sites and domains tied to cybercrime services or forums online". Some of DDoS-Guard's notable clients have included the Palestinian Islamic militant nationalist movement Hamas, American alt-tech social network Parler, and various groups associated with the Russian state.