Cyveillance

Cyveillance, founded in 1997, is a private Internet-monitoring company based in Arlington County, Virginia and provides an intelligence-led approach to security.

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 and malware 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 was bought in May 2009 by the UK firm Qinetiq, for an initial cash consideration of $40 million.[1]

Criticisms

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

1. Their robots access many pages, and thus use a comparatively large amount of bandwidth.^{[citation needed]}
2. They ignore the robots.txt exclusion standard, which specifies pages that should not be accessed by robots.^{[citation needed]}
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. It actually has changed it to "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2".)^{[citation needed]} (Ironically, while Cyveillance is in the business of protecting the intellectual property of its clients, its falsified user-agent string could be violating one or more trademarks.)
4. The company does not always respond to cease and desist letters.^{[citation needed]}

External links

• Cyveillance company website
• CNET article on Microsoft-Cyveillance partnership
• EWeek article on Intersections-Cyveillance partnership
• BusinessWeek overview
• Chris Gulker - What to think about Cyveillance?
• Who Is Cyveillance And Why Should You Care?
• Cyveillance activity on Judicial corruption site
• Corporate web abuse: The worst offenders from Cyveillance to PicScout includes Cyveillance' netblocks