I got a political brochure in the mail today, and it was a nasty piece of work. Perhaps the worst part is that the URL for their attack web site is the candidate’s name, as in “JohnSmith.com.”

Many times, people looking for information will simply enter the name of a person or company followed by “.com.” Voters wanting to learn about the candidate may enter his name and end up on a site set up by his political enemies. People who do not read the attack brochure carefully may even think that the “JohnSmith.com”  site is the candidate’s official site.

Fortunately for this politician, when you do a Google search on his name, his real campaign site comes up first and the attack site was not in the top results. However,  you can not be certain that this will happen if you are ever the victim of this kind of identity theft.

You may think that you do not need to own <yourname>.com. You do business under a company name, and you do not ever plan to run for office, so why do you need to register your name as a domain name? [Read more…]