Is Your ISP Watching You?

In May of this year, the Federal Trade Commission urged ISPs to "pay more attention" to what their customers were doing online. One of the important areas addressed was watching for suspicious patterns of emails that could mean that the customer’s PC was compromised by zombie code. Zombie PCs are used by spammers to do the dirty work of sending out the mass of spam emails. In fact, zombie PCs are responsible for 40 percent of the spam sent today.

Though I agree that zombie PCs are a real problem that should be addressed, what are the ISPs doing to follow this "recommendation?" Are they just reading email headers or are they parsing the content of your emails themselves? It appears to me that they are parsing the emails themselves. According to an article on ZDnet, a company called ICG has been hired by many ISPs to fight the zombie spambot problem. This list of ISPs has not yet been released. Visiting ICG’s website, I clicked on "iThreat Industry Solutions" for "Internet Service Providers." This took me to a page that details their software and what it does - "iThreat® Service Provider Solutions draw on the unique capabilities of ICG’s Mailer.base™.  Mailer.base™’s parsing engine processes the headers and bodies of millions of messages received. The parsed contents are interrelated, and linked to other intelligence sources relevant to e-mail-based threats, allowing service providers to track the nature and sources of harmful communication sent to, from, or spoofing their domains and IP address ranges."

If it was just a matter of parsing the emails, well, that’s one thing…but they are comparing them to other sources of intelligence. This to me implied the use of a database on their end. I did further investigating on the ICG website and found that the company is into all kinds of web-monitoring activity. In fact, the website states: "ICG investigators utilize our proprietary technologies as well as public and private data sources to obtain intelligence that clarifies the identity, motives, and impacts of individuals or groups responsible for the alias or site. By cross-referencing our findings against closed-source public record databases and our own intelligence, we can effectively refine and target suspects. ICG analysts are experienced in undercover correspondence, undercover purchases, and management of confidential informants."

So let me get this straight, this company has possibly been hired by my ISP to parse my emails, compare the content in them to various data sources, some of them being PRIVATE public records, and determine if I’m a threat, all based on a recommendation from the FTC? Whoa. Can we say Big Brother?