Cyveillance


In 2015, Cyveillance was acquired by LookingGlass Cyber Solutions. The following information was up to date as of December 2015:
Cyveillance is a company involved in the cyber intelligence industry. Cyveillance uses a proprietary technology platform and human analysts to identify risks early for prevention and mitigation.

Background

Cyveillance was founded in 1997, and is based in Reston, Virginia, United States.
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.
The United States Secret Service contracts Cyveillance to search available information related to the Secret Service and its missions. Information obtained through Cyveillance is incorporated into the Protective Research Information Management System PRISM, an existing Secret Service system.
Cyveillance was bought in May 2009 by the UK firm QinetiQ for an initial cash consideration of $40 million. Current management was also entitled to an additional $40 million at the anniversary of the closing dependent on hitting certain performance numbers.
Cyveillance's clients include firms from the financial services, energy, technology, retail, and pharmaceutical industries. Cyveillance provides open source internet intelligence to over 400 clients, including half of the Fortune 100.

Timeline

Cyveillance was founded in 1997 by Brandy Thomas, Christopher Young, Mark Bildner, and Jason Thomas. It was originally called Online Monitoring Services but was renamed in 1998 to Cyveillance. From 1997 to 2009, Cyveillance was privately held until QinetiQ North America, a provider of information technology and engineering solutions to the U.S. government, acquired Cyveillance in May 2009. In 2013 QinetiQ North America expanded the Cyveillance management team with appointment of technical and marketing executives.

Management

QinetiQ Senior Management:
Cyveillance Management Team:
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.
  2. Their robots send many fake HTTP attacks which are a cover channel for deadly 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.
  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. ", and "Mozilla/4.0 Below is a sample of an actual Apache HTTP Server log file sample showing IP address that belongs to Cyveillance, and faked User-Agent browser identification string:
38.100.21.65 - - "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 6163 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 "
38.100.21.65 - - "GET /styles.css HTTP/1.1" 200 5092 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 "

  1. The company does not always respond to cease and desist letters.
  2. Because they falsify their string agent and otherwise obscure their identity,, Individuals may not be aware of the existence of Cyveillance and the data its collects and reports to the Secret Service.
On 2 July 2014 Cyveillance sent a DMCA takedown notice to GitHub on behalf of Qualcomm which caused 116 files to be blocked on GitHub. Some of the blocked repositories were owned by CyanogenMod, Sony Mobile and even one of Qualcomms own repositories leading to speculation that the notices have been automatically generated and poorly checked. On 5 July 2014 Qualcomm retracted all of the takedown notices, apologized and will be reviewing all the files.