Ha ha, fooled you! Shares tumble over G4S fake website profit warning

Contain the domains

Rob Cotton, chief exec of of security consultancy firm NCC Group, said the incident offered lessons for other publicly traded companies.

“Making sure you’ve got the right internet domains is often dismissed by executives as simply a job for the marketing department," Cotton commented. "However, we’ve got an incident here that’s affected share price, and that’s going to send tremors right up to board level."

“A website might look the part, but how can we know that it’s trustworthy? In cases such as this, where the perpetrator has gone to such great lengths to recreate the original, it’s nigh on impossible," he added.

The addition of hundreds of further generic top level domains is only going to make the problem worse, according to Cotton. “No longer will cyber criminals have just .com and .co.uk at their disposal, they’ll have .xyz, .shop and .london," Cotton concluded. ®