A growth in brandjacking is hitting the pharmaceutical industry hard, with continued growth in listings for pharmaceuticals on business-to-business exchange sites as well as increased traffic to illicit pharmacies.

That’s the key finding from MarkMonitor’s latest Brandjacking Index, an independent report that tracks and analyses online abuses of leading brands.

MarkMonitor searched approximately 134 million public records daily for brand abuse in domain data as well as Internet feeds from leading international Internet Service Providers (ISPs), email providers and other alliance partners.

“Scammers are opportunists, and by targeting the supply chain they’re positioning themselves to move the greatest amount of fake product they can,” said Frederick Felman, chief marketing officer at MarkMonitor. “This poses a potential danger to brand reputation.”

To complete the study, MarkMonitor chose six leading prescription drug brands and examined nearly 20,000 instances of cybersquatting – the practice of abusing trademarks within the domain name system; 3,000 online pharmacies and 652 B2B exchange listings for those brands during July 2009.

Of the 2,930 online pharmacies MarkMonitor found in this study, only four were certified in the VIPPS program by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, the governing body for US pharmacies. The others offered discounts as high as 90% from the prices offered by VIPPS-certified Web sites, suggesting the products are of suspicious quality.