Cyveillance - Criticisms

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.
  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.
  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. Ironically, although 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.

Read more about this topic:  Cyveillance

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