One of the Most Popular Global Cartoons Gets Group-IB Brand Protection

MOSCOW, Nov. 23, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Group-IB, one of the global leaders in providing high-grade Threat Intelligence and best-in-class anti-fraud solutions vendor, has been protecting the brand of the Masha and the Bear animated series against the distribution of illegal products on the Internet. The cartoon's YouTube channel is consistently ranked among the top  five most popular in the world, while one copy of the video "Recipe For Disaster" has received over 2.5 billion views on YouTube, making it the site's seventh-most viewed video of all time. During the first three months of cooperation, Group-IB has blocked online sales of products to the value of $67,000.

In 2016, the sale of goods under animated brands brought $118 billion to their creators all over the world. Bloomberg estimates 2015 revenue from the sale of goods under the Masha and the Bear trademark to be around $240 million.

"We select partners to manufacture products under our name very carefully, control the quality of branded products and do not cooperate with producers of low-quality goods," says Dmitriy Loveyko. "But as the popularity of our characters grows, the problem of counterfeit distribution is becoming increasingly pressing. By working with Group-IB, we are expecting to considerably reduce illegal online sales and redirect the traffic to the official stores."

During three months of cooperation, Group-IB specialists have detected over 100 online stores and several thousand advertisements offering goods under the Masha and the Bear brand, including toys, clothes, shoes, stationery, backpacks, life-size puppets and puzzles. A quarter of these advertisements are offering wholesale supplies.

In order to solve the counterfeit distribution problem, Group-IB uses its proprietary Brand Protection system, which automatically detects websites offering products under the Masha and the Bear brand in real time and identifies illegal sales on the basis of preset criteria and machine learning technology. The system tracks violations, classifies them depending on potential economic damage and allows eliminating them quickly. Due to well-established interaction with major Russian and global trading platforms, the advertisements are blocked semi-automatically. In three months, Group-IB has managed to block 97 percent of illegal offers identified through the pre-trial process.

"The principal risk behind counterfeit products is the low quality of goods, which may adversely affect the health of children and their parents. Unfortunately, reputational losses in such cases are suffered by brand owners," comments Andrey Busargin, director of brand protection in Group-IB. "That is why it is very important to protect customers against illegal sellers and prevent the distribution of counterfeit goods. And modern technologies allow us to do that very effectively."

About Group-IB

Group-IB is one of the global leaders in preventing and investigating high-tech crimes and online fraud. The company is recognized by Gartner as a threat intelligence vendor with strong cybersecurity focus and the ability to provide leading insight to the Eastern European region and recommended by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). The Company is a permanent member of the World Economic Forum. Group-IB's experience has been fused into an ecosystem of highly sophisticated software and hardware solutions to monitor, identify and prevent cyber threats. Group-IB runs the largest computer forensics laboratory in Eastern Europe, as well as an official computer emergency response team, CERT-GIB. In 2017, the company was recognized by IDC as a leading player on the Russian threat Intelligence services market.

More information at http://www.group-ib.com.

Evgeny Gukov
+7 968 865 6916

SOURCE Group-IB