Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer...

A British cyber-security firm is reporting that the biggest looming threat on the net isn't viruses or exploits... it's good old-fashioned smear campaigns.

According to mi2g, Corporate hate sites are the new rage -- or vent for rage, however you want to look at it. They surveyed 125 global CEOs to substantiate their warning.

Already, there are more than 10,500 anti-corporate hate sites online. Some are meant to vent grievances, others are more insidious. In some cases, the owners of the "hate site" offered to sell the domain to the smear target... which is really little more than digital extortion.

As the keeper of your corporate reputation, it might not be a bad idea to "google" yourself every now and then, or even use a tool like Google Alerts to do the web-crawling for you. Watch for website names that are variations of your company name, including words like "ihate" at the beginning or "sucks" or "myths" at the end.