Cyveillance

Cyveillance, founded in 1997, is a private Internet-monitoring company based in Arlington, 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; and Trademark and brand abuse

Cyveillance was bought in May 2009 by the UK firm QinetiQ, for an initial cash consideration of $40 million.

Cyveillance's clients include the pharmaceutical industry and entities within the entertainment industry, particularly music and movie concerns, specifically, the RIAA and MPAA. Cyveillance runs scans which attempt to gain unauthorized 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.

Management

Cyveillance is part of QinetiQ's Mission Solution's Group, headed by Stephen Cambone, a former US Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence who served President George W. Bush. Many of QinetiQ's clients are in the defense and other government arenas.

Cyveillance's corporate officers include:

• Dave Papas, Chief Operating Officer.

• Manoj Srivastava, Chief Technical Officer, and a former VeriSign executive.

• Richard D. Rose, Chief Financial Officer.

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. Their robots send many fake HTTP attacks which are a cover channel for deadly (accept, read, write) timeout attacks which easily disrupt Apache and IIS servers.
3. They ignore the robots.txt exclusion standard, which specifies pages that should not be accessed by robots.^{[citation needed]}
4. 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" and "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)" has also been seen.)^{[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.)
5. 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 corporate overviewBusinessWeek article
• 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