Always shocked to see "WWE" in a trade mag, but this is a pretty universal story of how companies have to deal with online threats to their intellectual property (sprinkle air quotes as necessary).
Originally posted by Computerworld: Scams, Spams & Shams (computerworld.com)It's hard to understand who in their right mind would want to incur the wrath of "Triple H," the intimidating superstar of professional wrestling. But when a poser created a fraudulent MySpace account in Triple H's name, it wasn't the wrestler that the perpetrator had to contend with.
The smackdown came from someone who was actually watching the wrestler's back -- Lauren Dienes-Middlen. She's vice president of intellectual property at World Wrestling Entertainment, the Stamford, Conn., company that owns the trademark. WWE notified MySpace, which terminated the account immediately.
The growth of social networks has brought a variety of threats that can potentially damage a brand's good name. Most of those threats aren't new, however. Social networks have simply become another attack vector, whether for spreading malware, launching assaults on an individual's or company's reputation, or creating impostor social networking sites that divert traffic away from the brand's legitimate sites.
Originally posted by that articleDienes-Middlen says the challenge isn't shutting down the sites that WWE finds, but keeping up with the new ones that continue to crop up. While businesses can assign employees to do that, she recommends trying a third-party monitoring service to get a handle on the problem. Dienes-Middlen thought she had things under control -- until she did a test run with brand protection service MarkMonitor.
In honour of TNA's first ever Sunday PPV, and because I don't tax this server's bandwidth enough, here now for your review is the infamous SPECIAL VIDEO LOOK AT JEFF HARDY from the 1.10.4 episode of "TNA Wrestling Impact!
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