Should Your Business Be Afraid of the Dark Web?
The Dark Web poses numerous threats to businesses of all sizes, serving as a platform for illegal activities including the trade of stolen data and identities. This underground practice can significantly weaken business security and trust. However, the focus should be on being prepared rather than being afraid. Our Dark Web Monitoring service is designed to expose hidden threats, providing businesses with an early warning system against potential breaches.
By continuously scanning the Dark Web, we help secure your digital assets before they are compromised. Integrating our monitoring services into your IT security strategy not only strengthens your defences but also ensures your business remains strong against cyber threats. With our support, you can navigate the digital age with confidence, safeguarding your business against the unseen dangers of the Dark Web.
FAQ
Most frequent asked questions and answers
The dark web is a hidden universe contained within the “deep web”— a sub-layer of the internet that is hidden from conventional search engines. The surface web today makes up only 4% of the internet. It stores only 19TB of data. Imagine how tiny it is in comparison to the dark web, which has an estimated 7,500TB of data. The dark web is estimated to be 550 times larger than the surface web and growing*. Because you can operate anonymously, the dark web holds a wealth of stolen data and illegal activity.
Our service is designed to help both public and private sector organizations detect and mitigate cyberthreats that leverage stolen email addresses and passwords. Dark Web ID leverages a combination of human and artificial intelligence that scours botnets, criminal chat rooms, blogs, websites and bulletin boards, peer-to-peer networks, forums, private networks and other black- market sites 24/7, 365 days a year, to identify stolen credentials and other personally identifiable information (PII).
Dark Web ID focuses on cyberthreats that are specific to our clients’ environments. We monitor the dark web and the criminal hacker underground for exposure of our clients’ credentials to malicious individuals. We accomplish this by looking specifically for our clients’ top-level email domains. When a credential is identified, we harvest it. While we harvest data from typical hacker sites like Pastebin, a lot of our data originates from sites that require credibility or a membership within the hacker community to enter. To that end, we monitor over 500 distinct internet relay chatroom (IRC) channels, 600,000 private websites, 600 Twitter feeds and execute 10,000 refined queries daily.
While we can’t say definitively that the data we’ve discovered has already been used to exploit your organization, the fact that we are able to identify this data should be very concerning. Organizations should consult their internal or external IT and/or security teams to determine if they have suffered a cyber incident or data breach.
While employees may have moved on from your organization, their company-issued credentials can still be active and valid within the third-party systems they used while employed. In many cases, the third-party systems or databases that have been compromised have been in existence for over ten years, holding millions of “zombie” accounts that can be used to exploit an organization. The discovery of credentials from legacy employees should be a good reminder to confirm you’ve shut down any active internal and third-party accounts that could be exploited.
Password Criteria is designed to allow you or your clients to identify what their on-network password criteria is in order to put a higher alert status on credential exposures that may meet these criteria. It allows you to enter minimum lengths, number of letters, numbers, special characters and capital letters.
In most cases, someone is testing a password against a series of users to gain access.
Fake email accounts are routinely created by employees as a “throw away” when wanting to gain access to a system or piece of data. However, fake email accounts are frequently created to facilitate well-crafted social engineering and/ or phishing attacks. Often, the identification of fake email accounts indicates that an organization has been targeted by individuals or groups in the past.
You do not need special permission to access the deep or dark web. However, accessing the deep or dark web requires the use of a “TOR” browser and should only be done using a VPN/ 10042017 encrypted tunnel. In general, we advise against attempting to access the dark web.
Once the data is posted for sale within the dark web, it is quickly copied and distributed (resold or traded) to many cybercriminals within a short period of time. It is generally implausible to remove data that has been disseminated within the dark web. Individuals whose PII has been discovered on the Dark Web are encouraged to enroll in an identity and credit monitoring service immediately.
Related Solutions
Cybercriminals make millions off selling your information
Your information provides a very lucrative business opportunity for cybercriminals. Hackers and scammers are smart and efficient. With just a few key personal details and basic technological skills, these criminals could potentially gain access to some of your most important accounts.
