Do No Harm! What could threaten your online business?

Do you think it is bad when competitors are watchful? This is very good, the most important thing is that they just watch but do not engage in harmful activities. In business, all means are good for achieving goals, but sometimes, some market participants forget about the rules of ethics and morality for the sake of eliminating a competitor. As a result, anyone who is going to open a business in the network must clearly understand what threats might be awaiting them in a virtual reality. Warned means armed, therefore, possible negative impacts on your business should at least be evaluated, as they will be discussed in this article.

As a rule, trouble comes when you do not expect it to come. And on the Internet, it comes at a time when your business starts to grow and you begin to pose a serious concern to your competitors. There are a lot of ways of neutralizing a competitor, and they are usually effective even when used separately, not to mention in combination. So, let’s look at different methods of effecting Internet projects.

How do customers reach you? Through ICQ, phone or Skype? Whatever it is, removing these channels, the plotters deprive you not only of potential customers but, most importantly, of patrons, who are used to contact you through your usual contact information. This is what is counted for, thus managing your business, be ready for the fact that once your contact information will stop working. Today, it is very easy to attack the ICQ, Skype, and even a phone number. Those who need it simply organize thousands or even millions of connections with your messengers or your phone number per second and then your ICQ, Skype or the phone number simply «falls», that is what those behind these attacks say.

Even the experts will tell you that effective protection almost does not exist. The only thing you can do is to get new contacts, which should be as soon as possible shown to the public. Then the new clients will be contacting you through new channels and old clients have to be contacted and notified that the channels have changed.

Have you ever wondered what happens if there are 20 million letters sent to your mailbox at one time? But those who organize such attacks have and they even know the answer. You can consider communication by e-mail to have stopped in that case. But that's only half a story, as the email can be changed and clients can be notified. Those who have decided to harm you may think of some crazier idea. There are technologies that can simulate the distribution of spam from your name. And what then? Then your domain registrar, and the hoster immediately disable your site, which would entail a stopover for your business.

In this case, as a rule, you will need to submit your papers and continue to prove who you really are. Of course, your site will be working again, when it will be clear that it was not you who was sending the messages, but if the attacks continue, then you can’t expect the site to operate normally.

When we read an online article about all the delights of Google Adwards, Yandex.Direct and other systems of contextual advertising, we, for some reason, always think about how great it would be to use such a marketing tool for our business, because ideally those who come to our site should be the ones interested in services offered by our business. Everything would be so, but a system of contextual advertising is usually built on pay-per-click method. And it means that someone may intentionally upon someone’s request be clicking on your ads, thus reducing your advertising budgets to zero. This problem today is one of the most acute, because it creates two types of criminals - those who are trying to reset your specific advertising budget, as well as those who are trying to earn money on clicks, that is, advertiser sites displaying contextual advertising on their platforms.

Unfortunately, there are practically no methods of confrontation. Those who propose contextual advertising systems are already concentrating on the creation of intelligent software to identify willful «Clicking» on the advertisement, but even these methods are powerless.

This is one of the most effective ways to influence, and the distinctive feature of it is that no one disturbs your site specifically. This move is aimed at your customers and potential users. Interestingly, this is not a one time impact, using information tools, skilled crackers store in the minds of Internet users that they should not use the services of your company. Many years may go by and the person might not even remember why he has bad associations with your brand and then you can be sure that you were effected by a professional high quality black PR. In more specific terms, as a rule, criminals use popular nick names in the forums to post negative feedback about your company, as well as all sorts of comments, posts on blogs and all the information sites that are visited by large numbers of people.

There are a few rules that any PR-specialist can tell you. First of all, you need to think several times about whether to engage in polemics about the insulting or negative feedback about your company. After all, if there was no response on the challenge, then outsiders might consider the call to be null. As soon as there is a subsequent official response from the company or you start using your own popular nick names, the discussion of your brand in a negative vein will gather momentum. Even if you have irrefutable proof that you are being compromised, people will still remember your brand not in the best light. Another way to counter the black PR-action is the official publication of information only on your site. Get your customers to believe that any information about your company, in the first place, appears on your site or blog of your company, and nowhere else. Firstly, it will create traffic to your site, and secondly, and most importantly, people will be reading news about your company not in forums but on your web site.

And as they say the sweetest is for the dessert. Or the worst? .. Of course, ddos attacks have become the plague of 21 century in the Internet industry. Botnets are steadily increasing in volume and now even sites of international corporations can not confront powerful ddos-attacks. There are many types of ddos attacks, but all of them are alike, your site is attacked by the huge number of requests from thousands of infected computers that are members of the botnet worldwide, after which the site «falls».

There is only one way - building capacity. It can not be fought programmatically. There are specific companies that deal with ddos-protection, reflecting the attack and filtering queries. Therefore, you should only contact these companies in order to protect your business from ddos attacks and the problem of ddos will be immediately resolved.

In conclusion, we can say that the methods of struggling among competitors are constantly improving, there are new ones appearing and you should always be prepared that your business can «bother» someone. But it should be remembered that sometimes we cause attacks on our business ourselves. Consider if you are not getting on someone’s way, whether you are ethical in relation to competitors and whether you are causing the aggression yourself? Be careful, keep your business and try to operate ethically, then you may be able to avoid a large number of problems awaiting at every corner in the Internet-based business ...

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