Guarding Against Online Sabotage

With the growing importance of online reputation, it makes a great deal of sense that an entire industry would have developed around sabotaging the reputations of competitors. The tactics used ranged from the simple to the incredibly ornate, but because of the nature of the internet even the simplest attacks can be very difficult to protect against. One of the most common tactics, and the most potentially damaging, is that of impersonation.

Online Impersonation

The vast majority of blogs and services allow users to register under any name, without any verification that you are who you say you are. Of course, this makes sense – with the exception of systems such as that used by Amazon, which requires a credit card to confirm your identity, it is virtually impossible to know who someone is online. But it creates an enormous potential for unscrupulous individuals to easily pretend to be you, and do and say whatever they want online under your name.

The first step, if someone has impersonated you online, is to contact the authorities. In most jurisdictions impersonating someone online for negative reasons is against the law. In many jurisdictions there are specific laws protecting your identity on social media sites, blogs, and other specific online forums, and in others more general umbrella statutes against impersonation will protect you. Many areas have special cyber crimes divisions, which can hunt down your impersonator to bring them to justice.

You may also wish to try to track down the impersonator yourself, to inform them that what they are doing is illegal, and to give them the opportunity to reverse the damage themselves. If you contact a blog on which an impersonator has posted, for example, you may be able to explain the situation to them and receive the poster’s IP address, which can help you track them down.

You’ll also want to find out the extent of the damage. A number of services, such as NameChk.com, exist to help you quickly determine whether your name is registered on an enormous range of social media sites. If it is, and you haven’t signed up there, you may want to investigate and see if it is simply someone else with your same name, or if it is a competitor pretending to be you to undermine your online reputation.

Once you know the extent of the damage, and you’ve informed the authorities so they can pursue the impersonator, you can either start to approach websites about removing the negative information, or have an online reputation management company work for you and create positive information to bury the negative results.