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The Impact of Cookie Hijacking on Your Brand's Reputation

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Selins Jesse

An affiliate marketing campaign is unsuitable unless you comprehend its nature and parameters. The concept of affiliate marketing is simple. Your company’s marketing team hires reputed affiliates to get more leads and qualified traffic.

The affiliates promote your company’s products and services on their websites. Each time a user clicks on the links posted by the affiliate, you are entitled to pay them a commission. Affiliate marketing leverages the performance-based model of marketing.

It is an effective way to earn good-quality traffic. And in today’s digitized age, affiliate marketing is the best way to build the identity of your company online. To optimize your affiliate marketing KPIs, you need to understand the role of cookies.


The best way to stay protected from cookie hijacking is by implementing monitoring solutions. Here are essential aspects to know about the hijacking of cookies by threat actors.


What Role Do Cookies Play in Affiliate Marketing?

The key to success in affiliate marketing is cookies. Cookies are small data files. They are txt files that download to your user’s devices when they visit your website. The main function of cookies is to optimize the user experience of your website.

Cookies play an integral role in saving the login credentials of your users. They also play their part in the authentication of the visitors trying to access your website from various devices. Cookies store website information and fine-tune the loading speed of the webpage the next time the visitor accesses it.


While cookies are a good thing for your website and online branding, there’s a strategy that’s not suitable. It is commonly known as cookie hijacking.


Overview of Cookie Hijacking in Affiliate Marketing

Threat actors leverage cookie hijacking to derail your affiliate marketing campaigns. It refers to the placement of affiliate cookies by distributing adware through browser extensions. Malicious affiliates may also leverage Windows and MAC software applications to distribute these cookies.


The hijacking of cookies can be dangerous to your brand’s reputation. Cookie hijacking allows the threat actors to control the user’s entire web browsing session when they’re accessing your website. Nefarious affiliates can place affiliate cookies in the customer’s journey.

In the worst-case scenario, they can make an authorized purchase without the knowledge of your user. Cookie hijacking is a serious threat to affiliate marketing as it leads to the loss of your affiliate marketing budget. Implementing a session hijacking prevention tool is the most preferred way to stop these types of activities.


The Working Mechanism of Cookie Hijacking- Things you should Know

Cookie hijacking can happen when the adware waits for a user to log into your affiliate’s website. The adware steals the session cookie and sends it to the malicious affiliates. Cookie hijacking can also occur when nefarious affiliates send your users a fake login.

The victim unknowingly clicks this fake link and lets the threat actor steal the cookie. The malicious affiliates place the cookie in their browser and can impersonate the buying actions of your customer. Here are some key things to know about the working mechanism of cookie hijacking.


The Use of Malware and Adware

The threat actors may use a combination of adware and malware to trick your users. The malware and adware find a way into the system of your users. The main objective behind inserting malware is packet sniffing. They can also penetrate the session cookies.

The malware placed in the victim’s device offers remote access to the malicious affiliates. The threat actors can navigate the device of the user and impersonate them.


Cross-Site Scripting (CSS)

CSS is the practice of placing malicious software through a running code. These scripts are the side script of the browser of the users. The malicious affiliates leverage CSS to target the loyal customers of your company. Believing it to be from your company, the buyer executes the script. And once the user executes this script, the nefarious affiliates can access their session details and sensitive information.


The Intention Behind Stealing Cookies

Threat actors leverage cookie hijacking to accomplish various types of objectives. Here are some of the common objectives of malicious affiliates.


Redirecting your Loyal and Verified Users

Redirecting customers to a fake website with malware can be the intention behind cookie hijacking. When a customer visits this website unknowingly, they fall prey to cybercrime. The threat actors can also steal their sensitive data, like credit card information.


Identity Theft

In the digital world, cookies store the information of your users. Threat actors may leverage cookie hijacking to steal the identities of your loyal customers. And when this happens, things get worse for your brand’s reputation.


How can Virus Positive Technologies (VPT) help with Cookie Hijacking?

Customer journey hijacking can affect your brand’s goodwill in the target market. You can select the monitoring solutions of VPT to eliminate the risk of cookie hijacking from affiliate campaigns. The team at VPT works dedicatedly to safeguard your goodwill.

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Selins Jesse
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