Merger. What should you do with old websites and domains?

Treat them with care

Why?

Because someone else might be able to gain access to your email, sensitive information, social media accounts and billing etc by re-registering your old domain name! Providing big opportunities for fraud. In some countries lists of expired domain names are freely available to anyone!

Once the domain name is registered, changing something called the Mx record enables control over incoming emails. Having ownership of the domain name means they have full control over the incoming email flow and some key business intellectual property!

Having working access to an email address is powerful because by using password reset you will be able to gain access to whole range of services originally belonging to the former business and its staff.

These include:

email and file storage

Google Drive

social media accounts

your online shopping services – Amazon, eBay, PayPal

In some cases people also register these abandoned names to grab the SEO

Post M&A rationalisation often includes dropping older brand names and their associated domain names and this is quite common in professional service firm mergers. The risk here is that highly sensitive information (financial, personal, confidential and privileged information of the former owner) becomes accessible to bad actors with the associated risk to clients, reputation, and business.

Cyber expert Gabor Szathmari explains in great detail how he was able to gain access to an incredible volume of sensitive client information using abandoned domain names of law firms https://lnkd.in/eE_UA3is.

What business intellectual property have you left behind in a merger?

#merger #domainnames #businessintellectualproperty

Exalt IP experts in Business Intellectual Property. 

Get in touch for a Confidential, Free No Obligation Initial Review Book Here or check www.Exaltip.com     email john@exaltip.com or call +447587885131  for more information.     
 
For over 20 years I have been helping business to Win With IP: Using intellectual property to protect ideas, creations, inventions, and competitive advantage.
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