You've seen our website, you read our blog posts, and occasionally one of our posts pops up on your newsfeed. Hopefully, you have tried our products, too.
But in today's article, we thought we would give you some insight into some crazy stuff that's going on behind the scenes.
So, grab a small bowl of popcorn (this won't take long), and read on to get some exclusive behind-the-scenes info!
What's going on?
As a small family-run business, operating in an industry that is largely full of ethical players with good intentions, we never expected to be the subject of attacks. But how naive we were!
While these attacks have all ultimately failed to harm us as a business, the tactics used have been pretty dirty. As you can see in the list below:
- Negative SEO Attacks.
This is a tactic used by competitors that aims to stop a company's website from appearing in Google search results. It involves building huge quantities of spam links from dodgy websites (often adult websites) to the company's website.
The thinking behind this is that Google will eventually see the website as untrustworthy and remove it from the search results. Luckily, the tech guys at Google know this happens and they now largely ignore these dodgy links.
So in the end, the attacker is wasting their time and money (ha ha).
- Spam Emails.
This is another dirty trick that they have under their sleeves. Someone (or some robot), pretending to work for BROWN'S CBD, has emailed thousands of businesses, all over the world, claiming that they are infringing copyright law by using our images on their websites.
Weird, right? We're not really sure what the main aim is with this one. Maybe to tarnish our reputation, get us bad reviews, or waste our time.
However, most people just recognise that these are spam emails and ignore them, as they do not come from our company email address. So again, largely a waste of time.
- Reporting us to trading standards.
In this instance, we have had someone (probably from another CBD company) report us for ‘potentially’ being a non-compliant company.
The result of this was an email from trading standards requesting evidence that we are operating as a legal and compliant company. Which we provided - end of story.
Well done - attacker, all you have achieved here is a minor inconvenience to us and the trading standards officer. We think this one damaged your reputation more than ours.
- DDOS Attack
This one is a little more serious. A DDOS attack is a way of bringing a website's server down by overwhelming it with fake traffic.
In this instance, the attacker did manage to take our website offline, for around one hour. But luckily, the tech guys that maintain our network used this as an opportunity to strengthen defenses so it doesn't happen again.
We can't say if this attack was specifically aimed at us, as there are many different businesses on the same network. But with all of the other attacks going on it wouldn't surprise us if it was.
These are the attacks we know about, who knows what else they have done or are planning…
Who is doing this?
Without paying a highly skilled investigator, it's pretty much impossible to know for sure who is doing this. But it's obviously someone who either sees us as a threat or want's us to disappear.
So it's most likely either someone in the CBD industry or someone who works in an industry that has suffered economically due to this wonderful, well-being-boosting compound being readily available to the masses.
We'll leave you to speculate on that one… But whoever it is must be a highly unethical individual.
Anyway, the important thing is - despite these petty tactics, we continue to grow as a business and spread the benefits of the hemp plant far and wide!
Thanks for reading! If you want to defy these evil forces and support your well-being as well as our growth, click the ‘shop now’ button at the top of your screen to check out our CBD products.