• by Lynn Russo Whylly , February 27, 2007

Data security management no longer just means VPNs and firewalls. It includes preventing online abuse and fraud such as phishing, spamming, counterfeit sales, and unauthorized logo use. And that responsibility falls in the marketing domain.

VeriSign's new digital brand- and fraud-protection service helps marketers protect revenue and brands by rapidly detecting and responding to incidents.

VeriSign maintains the 60 million-plus dot.com and dot.net domain registry, processing over 20 billion Web access transactions daily.

"The service frees up interns who run keyword searches all day," says Mike Denning, vice president and general manager of digital brand management services at VeriSign. "As a manual process, it was impossible to cover the entire Internet. Now the crawling can be done on an exponentially larger scale."

And the results are measurable. The average loss for customers who've been phished is $1,800, Denning says. "If you protect 10,000 customers from a phishing attack and 10 percent would have responded, that's a savings of $1.8 million."