1. Barack Obama’s Re-election Campaign.
In 2012 the most powerful man in the world, US president Barack obama, fell victim to cybersquatting/ domain squatting. Before the Presidents advisors could announce that they would be turning the remainder of reelection campaign funds into a new nonprofit, Organising for Action, savvy cybersquatters saw the great financial potential in securing the domain name first. They claimed organisingforaction.com and organisingforaction.org beating the president to the punch!
2. Bank of America
One of the worlds most lucrative banks, Bank of America was involved in a high profile case of cybersquatting when opportunistic domain squatters saw the potential in strategically buying domain names for possible future bank mergers and subsequently selling them on eBay.The domains for sale included bankofamericamerrilllynch.com and bofaml.com.
3. Youtube
Global giant, Youtube was targeted by typo-squatters in a highly publicised corporate typo-squatting case. The domain name yuube.com was bought with the sole purpose of targeting YouTube users, anticipating that a large amount of YouTube traffic would mis-spell the domain name. When a user accidentally typed yuube.com they would be redirected to a malicious website or page.
4.American Express
A high profile case of phishing occurred when fraudulent emails purportedly from Global corporation, American Express were sent to an unknown number of recipients. A simple DNS change could have been made to thwart this spoofed email, but American Express failed to make any changes.
5.Burger King
Burger King fell victim to a bad case of brand-jacking when the company’s logo was hi-jacked and replaced with an advertisement of it’s main competitor, McDonalds. Promptly after this, a fraudulent ‘news’ story followed purporting that Burger King had been sold to its rival Mc Donalds as a result of persistent drug use of its employees. The hack lasted for approximately an hour until the twitter account was suspended.
Source: Wikipedia.
