Cyveillance

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Cyveillance is a private Internet-monitoring company based in Arlington, VA. Founded in 1997, Cyveillance provides online risk monitoring and management solutions to large organizations, such as members of the Fortune 500. The company comprehensively monitors the Internet using war scripts and bots. The company claims to monitor the “hidden Internet,” far beyond the reach of commercial search engines, including

  • World Wide Web
  • Blogs
  • Message boards
  • Spam email
  • Usenet newsgroups
  • Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
  • Online auctions
  • Global domain registrations.

The company’s subscription-based product, the Cyveillance Intelligence Center, is a hosted solution. Companies hire Cyveillance to monitor for Internet risks such as:

  • Information leaks
  • Phishing attacks and other online fraud schemes
  • Sale of stolen credit and debit card numbers
  • Threats to executives and events
  • Counterfeiting
  • Trademark and brand abuse

Cyveillance's clients include entities within the entertainment industry, particularly music and movie concerns, specifically, the RIAA and MPAA. Cyveillance runs scans which attempt to gain access to P2P networks, Web servers, IRC servers, FTP servers, and mail servers, searching for mp3 audio files and movie titles. After running the scan, the site scanned is archived, and the information sold to the RIAA and/or MPAA.


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[edit] Partnerships

Cyveillance has partnerships with AOL and Microsoft that enable the ISPs to proactively protect their customers from accessing confirmed phishing sites. Cyveillance also partners with Intersections, an identity theft company, to alert consumers when their credit card numbers and personal data are compromised on the Internet. Cyveillance has uncovered 1.2 million unique consumer credit card numbers offered for sale on the Internet, in addition to personal information such as Social Security and bank account numbers.


[edit] Positive Contributions

  1. They help enforce cybersquatting laws
  2. They isolate phishing attacks so they can quickly be shut down and blocked.
  3. They create a hostile environment for financial fraud.


[edit] Criticisms

Numerous websites have complained about Cyveillance's traffic for the following reasons:

  1. Their robots access many pages in a short period of time and use a comparatively large amount of bandwidth. The access of many pages in a short period of time is a result of the use of modern standards like HTTP pipelining to reduce the load on servers and the intervening network. Since the same amount of data can be transferred with less packet overhead, this actually results in less data transfer.
  2. They ignore the robots.txt exclusion protocol, which specifies pages that should not be accessed by robots. This protocol, however, is purely advisory.
  3. They use a falsified user-agent string, usually pretending to be some version of Microsoft Internet Explorer on some version of Windows, which is deceptive and can throw off log analysis. (Interestingly, this is one way to identify the crawler, as it often lists 'Windows XP' in the user-agent. A real Windows XP system actually identifies itself as 'Windows NT 5.1'. This method should not be depended on for positive identification, however, as Cyveillance has been known to change its user-agent strings from time to time.)


[edit] External links

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