Re: Meet the iMarker, Russian targeted ad service which analyze your traffic on ISP side

Actually, it seems like *it is* Phorm. They mention yourself as Phorm's representatives in Russia here: https://www.facebook.com/imarker.ru/photos/a.340885905946086.85421.332865510... Seems like Phorm bought them at the some stage, and that tweet from iMarker founder says they fired him https://twitter.com/mberlizev/status/501487701124972544, also some info about replaced software inside ISP networks without their knowledge https://twitter.com/mberlizev/status/497329705163710464, another posts in Mikhail Berzliev's company ADEx FB mention takeover by Phorm https://facebook.com/adex.provider/posts/630807190348314 https://facebook.com/adex.provider/posts/630182937077406 Virilha:

It remembers me about Phorm at UK, BR, some other countries also.

There is a firefox addon to detect / scramble / block this kind of redirects URLs, generating random unique IDs to throw garbage on the data the ISP collects.

https://www.dephormation.org.uk/?page=2

But seems its not open source.

--Virilha

----- Message from Anton Nesterov --------- Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 20:45:13 +0000 From: Anton Nesterov Subject: Meet the iMarker, Russian targeted ad service which analyze your traffic on ISP side To: cypherpunks@cpunks.org

...

How it works?

ISPs install the iMarker equipment and mirror all user's traffic on it (Russian surveillance system, SORM, works the same way). Software takes time, URL and HTTP Headers from HTTP requests. Then scraper with IP 92.242.35.54 and User-Agent WebIndex follow every visited URL and analyze its content. All this information used to build a profile for user. They says that information is removed right after analysis, and software saves only result of that analysis. Their website lists that they categorize users by search queries, online shopping activity, time of visits, activity on social networks, keywords on visited pages, visited websites, social-demographic info, such as sex, age, marital status, and education level, and then they use that data to distribute users for consumers groups. Every user has some kind of pseudonymous ID with linked profile.

It's also has an opt-out option http://www.imrk.net/status

How many users affected?

They says it's 38 million people all over Russia. Minister of Communication Nikolay Nikiforov said in 2014 there was 62 million people in Russia using Internet, 56m of them do it every day, so it's 61% of Russian Internet users. iMarker's website list Akado, Rostelecom, ER-Telecom, NetByNet, Qwerty, and TTK as ISPs that installed iMarker's equipment.

How to check if this affects you?

If you are a client of Russian ISP, you can check it here http://imarker.valdikss.org.ru If you own a webserver, grep the logs for connections from 92.242.35.54.

How do check script works?

It generate a random link and wait for 3 seconds for connection from iMarker's IP address.

How long iMarker works?

Company start work on January 2010, commercial sells started on August 2011.

http://imarker.valdikss.org.ru/ — script that checks if your ISP use iMarker http://www.vedomosti.ru/tech/news/15669231/bolshoj-reklamnyj-brat — report on iMarker from 2013, says they are ready to provide free DPI to ISPs in exchange of user's data (Russian) http://sporaw.livejournal.com/347832.html — blog post quoting private mails from iMarker's crew (Russian) http://www.imrk.net/privacy — TOS (Russian) http://habrahabr.ru/post/247465/ — blog post about iMarker (Russian) http://www.imarker.ru/ — iMarker website (Russian) http://www.imrk.net/status — opt-out page (Russian) http://minsvyaz.ru/ru/news/index.php?id_4=44571 — Nikiforov's statement on number of Russian Internet users (Russian)

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