There are even companies specializing in editing wikipedia, following forums and IRC channels and what the hell not.
One well known example is Cyveillance, the same company that broke the news of Sarah Palins wikipedia edits (for what reason and for what client, I can only wonder).
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRel ... RN20090706
Cyveillance strengthens QinetiQ North America's cyber posture
MCLEAN, Va., July 6 /PRNewswire/ -- QinetiQ North America, a provider of
information technology and engineering solutions to the U.S. government,
effective July 1st has acquired Cyveillance, a leading provider of cyber
intelligence products to commercial clients. Under the terms of the deal,
Cyveillance will now operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of QinetiQ North
America.
http://liveanduncensored.com/2008/08/do ... lance.html Cyveilliance normally trawls the Internet for data on behalf of clients seeking open source information in advance of a corporate acquisition, an important executive hire, or brand awareness. For example, an executive updating his Wikipedia page or resume on Monster.com may be an indication of that person's plans to change jobs, or even that the company is in financial trouble.
Heavy Wikipedia action on Sarah Palin's bio page yesterday. That's what you call "sculpting a WINNAR."
http://www.microrose.co.uk/whoiscyv.htmComprehensive solutions are targeted to preserve valuable brand equity and are offered on an annual subscription basis, including:
Digital Asset Protection
Protect your valuable assets against piracy and plagiarism while uncovering unlicensed revenue opportunities for your brand.
Brand Management
Be aware of and understand the presence of your brand online and how it is being impacted by others.
Partner Management
Ensure partners are representing you in your best interests, while detecting unauthorised distribution of your product.
Security
Complement traditional security initiatives with online awareness of cyber threats or other risks.
Custom Data Mining
Mine the Internet for new leads and more.
Competitive Intelligence
Be aware of the public online activities of competitors that provide insight into your market strategy.
Partial list of respected Cyveillance customers, worldwide:
Associated Press
AT&T Broadband
DeBeers
DirecTV
Dow Jones
Enterprise
Fairmont Hotels
Frank Russell
Goodyear
JP Morgan Fleming Merrill Lynch
Michelin
Nasdaq
Nextel
Nintendo
PricewaterhouseCoopers
Six Continents
Sprint
T. Rowe Price
Washington Post
http://secpriv.com/who-is-cyveillance-a ... d-you-careWho Is Cyveillance And Why Should You Care?By Ian Scott
If you maintain a website, keep a blog, chat on IRC or other Internet “chat rooms,” you should be very concerned about a private corporation in the United States called Cyveillance.
Today, I was going through some web log files and discovered something strange. An IP address identifying itself as “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows XP)” and sometimes as “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.05; Windows NT 3.51)” had been dowloading a number of html pages in minutes, sometimes even seconds. My first thoughts that whoever was downloading these pages must have been a super fast reader, or was simply clicking on links.
But then I noticed something else. This “browser” wasn’t downloading any of the images on the web pages! That’s a curious anomoly for a Mozilla 4.0 compatible browser.
In cases like this, Google is your friend. I typed in the first three quadrants of the IP address and quite a few links were returned. Seems that this IP address is used by a spider that some refer to as the “Cyveillancebot.”
So who exactly is Cyveillance? According to their website, they are a company that claims to be “Minding your business on the net” with their “comprehensive internet monitoring technology.”
Who are their clients? From what I can gather, the U.S. Government has used their services and Cyveillance also claims that half of the Fortune 50 companies are counted among their customers. As well, the RIAA is reportedly a client, presumably for information on illegal music sharing. However, Cyveillance won’t say who exactly their clients are. Who knows who they are sharing your data, posts, and comments with?
Sneaky Intrusion Methods
At first glance, it appears that Cyveillance is simply offering a service to corporations to assist them with copyright infringments, theft of data, and protection of trademarks. But this is definitely not all they do. According to their website, the not only monitor HTTP (website) traffic, but they also monitor IRC and Chat rooms. I don’t know about you but if I am in a chat room, I have a least some small expectation of privacy with those that are in that room. I would not expect that some bot is logging everything, keeping it in a database for further review and perhaps sale to another corporation or government.
As well, on the Government Solutions, one of their selling points is “Assisting in compliance activities such as monitoring for whistleblower information.”
What the heck is that all about? One can only wonder. What governments use the services of Cyveillance to monitor their citizens and employees? I suppose that this could be a round about way for Governments that claim to respect privacy, to purchase information from a company. Governments can then claim they don’t collect data. They just forget to tell you that instead, they purchase it in report format. Already nicely formatted for them.
Of course, Governments need to know who the “about to become” whistleblowers are on corruption and illegal government activities, right?
According to OpinionEditorials.com, the Cyveillance website was once quoted as saying,
“the Internet poses threats to corporations that can take many forms.
[..] “activists use the Internet to plan rallies and boycotts,”
As well as IRC and Web spidering, Cyveillance also claims to spider FTP sites. According to J.D. Meadows who operates the Cyveillance Exposed website, his logs show evidence that not only did the Cyveillancebot spider available content, but also tried to search the hard drive for other files and directories. Clearly if true, Cyveillance has participated in actions that are clearly illegal, immoral and unethical.
For one thing, many people use their own ftp sites to upload and backup personal files, or as a temporary holder of data so that it may be accessed from different locations. They don’t expect that some webspider is going to come along and try to access that ftp site.
For another thing, it is illegal to attempt to crack a computer, and by using search methods to simply look for information without knowing it is there, is against the law. It does not matter the method of cracking that is used. Simple methods are just as illegal as more complicated cracks.
Another problem with the Cyveillancebot is that it ignores the convention of looking for a robots.txt file. A robots.txt file has been accepted as a file that web spiders would try to access first before spidering a site for over a decade, known as the Robot’s Exclusion Protocol. The robots.txt contains directives for webspiders regarding content that the site owner doesn’t want the spider to search. Clearly in my log files, the Cyveillance bot did not request the robots.txt file, so it is ignoring this common convention.
And in doing so, it is using up bandwidth that I am paying for but in a use that I never intended. I did not invite Cyveillance to spider my sites so they could sell their data to others, and by ignoring my robots.txt file, they are in fact stealing my bandwidth in order to add to their bottom line.
Not only that, but they use deception to try to hide what they are. Legitimate search engine spiders will identify themselves as such. For instance, when Google’s spider comes to visit my sites, it identifies itself as: “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)”
After discovering this information about Cyveillance, I went through my log files and did a search for their IP address showing up. Sure enough, hundreds, if not thousands of files had been downloaded from my servers over the past month.
For a single website owner who is concerned about this, they could use the .htaccess file to stop the Cyveillancebot from accessing their site. I didn’t have time to do that, and instead firewalled the IP range off.
Wondering if the Cyveillancebot has been visiting your site? Search your website logs for this: ‘63.148.99′ I’d be interested to know how many of you discover visits from this deceptful spider.
If the U.S. and Canadian Governments were as concerned about privacy as they claim to, companies like Cyveillance would not exist. Sure, when you post something up on your website or blog, it is public. But I doubt very much that you posted with the expectancy that some spider was going to come along, mine your data, and use to sell to others.
I’m certainly not going to let a spider like that steal resources that I’m paying for.
And of course, there is the even more sinister issue of surveillance of IRC and chat rooms that Cyveillance claims to do. If you really want some privacy, it’s time for you to think about Open Source software and chat programs that are capable of encrypted sessions.
What are your thoughts on this? Have you experienced Cyveillance visits? Doing anything about it? What about the possible surveillance of your chat sessons?
I bet there are many more firms that do this as well, Cyveillance is just a well known and seemingly CIA-NSA-allied company doing it.Like outright propaganda services and media operations centers for hire -
http://www.scl.cc/ Strategic Communications Laboratories -
"Communications Solutions, Elections (!), Behavioural Research, People, Contacts".
Just look at their site - those guys are some media spooks for hire if I ever saw some. This is their site header pic:
In the 21st Century, strategic communication can only really be effective by understanding the political, social, cultural and ideological make-up of an audience. Blanket propaganda campaigns of old are no longer viable: in order for a message to be persuasive, both the messenger and the message must have credibility. Addressing the right audience at the right time with the right message through the right channels can reduce, or even eliminate, possible conflict.
SCL are experts in designing and conducting the research that meets these criteria in order to create campaigns that will be the most influential, and ultimately successful, over a Target Audience.
SCL creates, implements, and evaluates complete Strategic Communication campaigns for governments and military organisations worldwide. SCL’s unique scientific approach focuses on creating real, measurable behavioural change, not simply conceptual change that may not be played out with real-world consequences.
SCL employs a diverse and innovative research methodology, developed by the Behavioural Dynamics Institute. It incorporates quantitative and qualitative research methods in order to examine the multitude of factors at various operational and strategic levels that contribute to the maintenance of a Non-Desired Behaviour. An ongoing process of hypothesis testing and refinement allows us to discern the most viable behaviour and group to target, and with what information. With this information, SCL can identify the most effective route to instigating a measurable behavioural change in a Target Audience, and design a campaign to achieve this goal.
SCL has carried out research and campaigns for clients in the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East and South and East Asia. Its clients have typically included NGOs, police departments, military forces, municipal authorities and the UN.
Right on motherfuckers, in other words.
http://www.bdinstitute.org/ Behavioural Dynamics Institute -
The Behavioural Dynamics Institute is an academic institute that specialises in understanding influence and persuasion in order to change audiences’ attitudes and behaviour. The institute specialises in applying its methodology to military and political campaigns, where the audiences are hostile or friendly, national or international.
The BDi was formed in 1990 and has invested over £19m in developing scientific approaches for ‘influencing a target audience’. The unique methodology draws extensively from group and social psychology and incorporates semiotics, semantics and many elements of cultural anthropology.
The BDi harnesses the leading academics from universities around the world so
that the ‘persuasion and influence’ body of knowledge is constantly at the cutting edge. Using advanced research techniques, the BDi can accurately diagnose an audience from within (in theatre) or remotely, so that a clear understanding of the group dynamics can be ascertained.
The BDi then develops the most powerful psychological approach (using the data) to produce a programme of communication and ‘perceptions,’ which will be the most likely to engineer the desired result from the Target Audience. The attitude and behavioural changes are highly quantifiable and accountable, generating a real MOE (Measure of Effectiveness) report.
The Behavioural Dynamics Institute can tell you how ‘difficult’ an audience is likely to be, how best to influence the audience and then can actually produce the communications or triggers that will change the audience.
In english - propaganda and lies, and how to sugarcoat em are their specialty.
