New Media Strategies
A couple days ago, I wrote about Relevant Noise, who turn out to be a corporate intelligence and “brand protection” service much like Cyveillance, and whose unwelcomeness here got them blocked.
Today, I checked the logfiles, and noticed a reader had visited that page after querying a certain search engine for “cyveillance”. Huh. Interesting. Running Firefox under Windows XP, I figured they were probably a webmaster of some site somewhere, looking (as I occasionally do) for newly-discovered Cyveillance netblocks to block traffic from.
The IP address was 64.240.189.65; the reverse DNS is seriously broken, so right now the Gods only know if there’s a hostname associated with that IP. What we mere mortals can tell, though, is it’s probably a router or firewall, being right at the beginning of it’s netblock (64.240.189.64 - 64.240.189.127).
That netblock, if you go look, belongs to a quite large company called “New Media Strategies”. (I believe it should be read as New “Media Strategies”, and not “New Media” strategies, but it could be the other way around.) Their website is heavy on congratulatory self-promotion and largely devoid of actual meaningful content, but a little digging makes it clear that they, too, are players in the “brand protection” game. In fact, they also dabble in “brand promotion”, i.e. marketing.
Diversification is good, but the combination of “Online Intelligence, Brand Promotion, and Brand Protection” should raise a few red flags, for fairly obvious reasons. Commercial online intelligence-mining in and of itself is not something I’m terribly fond of, but when combined with brand protection and promotion, it’s enough to get the netblock… blocked.
It’s interesting someone there was searching for posts about Cyveillance; opposition research, perhaps?
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