Tracking The Trackers: Commercial Surveillance Occurring on U.S. Army Networks
Alexander Master, Jaclyn Fox, Nicolas Starck, Maxwell Love, Benjamin Allison

TL;DR
This study analyzes web tracking on U.S. Army networks, revealing that over 21% of accessed domains are trackers, and suggests network and policy changes to mitigate risks.
Contribution
It provides a novel characterization of commercial web tracking on military networks using a new dataset and comparison against an open-source tracker database.
Findings
Over 21% of accessed domains were trackers.
CBII can be configured to better mitigate tracking risks.
Recommendations include network and policy changes.
Abstract
Despite current security implementations, Internet activity on DoD networks is susceptible to web trackers and commercial data collection, which have the potential to expose information about service members and unit operations. This report documents the outcomes of a study to characterize web tracking occurring on Army CONUS unclassified networks. We derived a dataset from the Cloud-Based Internet Isolation (CBII) platform, encompassing data measured over a two-month period in 2024. This dataset comprised the 1,000 most frequently accessed Internet resources, determined by the number of connection requests on CONUS DoDIN-A during the study period. We then compared all domains and subdomains in the dataset against Ghostery's WhoTracks.me, an open-source database of commercial tracking entities. We found that over 21% of the domains accessed during the study period were Internet…
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