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

Virilha cypherpunks at cheiraminhavirilha.com
Fri Jan 9 00:33:43 PST 2015


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 <komachi at openmailbox.org> ---------
    Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 20:45:13 +0000
    From: Anton Nesterov <komachi at openmailbox.org>
Subject: Meet the iMarker, Russian targeted ad service which analyze  
your traffic on ISP side
      To: cypherpunks at 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)
>
> --
> https://nesterov.pw
> GPG key: 0CE8 65F1 9043 2B11 25A5 74A7 1187 6869 67AA 56E4
> https://keybase.io/komachi/key.asc


----- End message from Anton Nesterov <komachi at openmailbox.org> -----







More information about the cypherpunks mailing list