What is Dark Web?

The Dark Web is a secret world of Hackers. Cyber Criminals and terrorists exist on the internet, and one cannot have access to them through traditional search engines or regular browsers. They can only be accessed through specially designed tools like TOR (The Onion Router), Freenet, I2P (Invisible Internet Project) where hackers and buyers meet anonymously and plot deals for various illegal services or information.

Web Surface is divided into three sections of the internet, shown below in the image:

Top 10 data breach in 2019 & 2020 

According to risk-based security research’s newly published report from Selfkey, the Top ten data breach records for the years 2019 and 2020 are listed below. These major data breaches happened because of various severe security risk/threat that was identified by hackers and compromised which has caused massive data breach around the world and has put all the information of users at high risk. 

According to risk-based security research’s newly published report from Selfkey, the Top ten data breach records for the years 2019 and

Dark Web Monitoring

Identity thieves can buy or sell your personal information on hard-to-find dark websites and forums. Dark Web Monitoring searches the dark web and notifies you should your information be found.

What is Dark Web Monitoring? 

Dark Web Monitoring is a service that regularly searches places on the dark web where information is traded and sold, looking for your information. If your information is found, you get a notification.

The dark web is a hidden network of websites that requires a special web browser to access. It’s hidden from search engines and allows users to mask their IP addresses. The dark web’s privacy and anonymity mean it serves as a venue for people who want to stay hidden, whether that’s for innocuous reasons, or because they’re involved in crime—including identity theft.

If someone has managed to steal your Social Security number or other identifying information, they may try to sell it on the dark web to someone who wants to use it to commit fraud. Dark web monitoring can help you keep your identity safe and, in doing so, protect your finances.

How Does Dark Web Monitoring Work?

Dark web monitoring looks for pieces of your personally identifiable information on sites frequented by cybercriminals. The service uses scrapers and web crawlers to monitor areas of the dark web where stolen information is commonly sold, including websites, peer-to-peer networks, and chat rooms. If they make a discovery, they’ll send you an alert to let you know your data was compromised. 

Dark web monitoring services scan hundreds of thousands of websites each day to look for personal information that criminals can use to steal your identity. That can include the following:

• Social Security number
• Email address
• Passport number
• Medical identification numbers
• Bank account numbers
• Phone numbers
• Driver’s license
• Credit/debit cards
• Retail/membership cards

Some monitoring services are bundled with more comprehensive identity theft services that go beyond just dark web scanning. These services also take into account credit reports, public records, commercial databases, and your financial accounts. It’s up to you to decide which options — if any — are worth investing in. 

Use Cases of Dark Web

Nowadays organizations have to compete with their dark web monitoring capabilities as it can be insignificant even with s great coverage. Nonetheless, dark web monitoring can be incredibly beneficial if they know where and what to look for. In this blog, we will discuss the top dark web monitoring use cases that make it more risk-based, proficient, and powerful.

Tracking Threats

Cybersecurity threats monitoring for risk management is one of the dark web monitoring use cases, to understand the threat actors that focus on the organization, VIPs, and also brands. Efficient investigation of these sources can carry insight to attackers’ tools, strategies, methods, operations, and motive which then we can apply to our security strategy.

Specifically, we need to comprehend these personas and how organized and well-known these threat actors and attack surfaces are. We need an understanding of their dark web forum handles, their reputations, what they do, where they do the work, and their whole modus operandi. Constantly gathering and tracking this data will help to apply context to these actors and better foresee and recognize threats, also empowering organizations to plan defense strategies.

Exposed Credentials

One of the most common instances we see with clients is exposed credentials for sale or exchange on chatting channels, forums, and criminal marketplaces. This use case offers protection from exposed data and credential stuffing. Since password reuse is common, credential stuffing has developed into a popular tactic to gain access to sites and sensitive data. Credentials from data breaches are sold in bulk on the dark web to other threat actors. Our tool and service, SearchLight, has detected 20 billion of these exposed credentials online to help prevent you and those in your digital footprint from being susceptible to targeted attacks.

Insider Threat of Dark Web

Insider threats can pose a significant threat to an organization’s bottom line due to the nature of privileged access or the sale of breached data. Sale postings or discussions of offerings of intellectual property or proprietary data sourced from the dark web can launch an investigation and identification of the “insider” within the organization and lead to immediate remediation through legal action.

For example, a client in the Financial Services industry was alerted to an insider selling privileged account access on a dark web forum. The firm was able to identify and disable the insider’s account and utilized screenshots of the forum posting from Photon Research as evidence in court. The insider in this instance was sentenced to time in jail.

In the case of a healthcare client, organizations can be alerted to both direct mentions requesting access to or data from their organization in addition to sale postings by insiders attempting to monetize access. This can prevent malicious insiders from exploiting such access or can detect “accidental insiders” who may expose data due to a lapse in security practices such as uploading to misconfigured Amazon S3 and Network Attached Storage (NAS) drives.

Monitor For Vulnerability for Dark Web

Vulnerability exploitation is also a common attack vector that cybercriminals and advanced persistent threats (APTs) use to gain system access. Forum users will commonly list zero-day vulnerabilities for sale or other exploit PoC code, opening the doors for more threat actors to use during their campaigns. Dark web intelligence can reveal mentions and chatter around CVE’s before they are exploited or even discovered by security researchers. Digital Shadows has even observed cybercriminals hosting competitions on both English and Russian language forums to find zero-day vulnerabilities and share proof-of-concept code. In these cases, disclosure of a vulnerability to widespread sharing across deep and dark web sources can take just a few days.

With continuous monitoring and alerting for specific CVE’s and vulnerability identifiers, teams can have the first-mover’s advantage in prioritizing a critical patch and mitigating a serious exploit before the knowledge and know-how of exploiting a vulnerability has become widespread amongst threats actors. 

Tools & Techniques

The Dark Web is reported to be a home for hackers and terrorists and it could pose a threat to your company. Find out precisely what the Dark Web is and what you can do to block it.

Here is our list of the 10 best dark web monitoring tools:

1.Echosec Beacon

Checks the Dark Web for compromised account credentials, and stolen personal information and financial data.

2.DarkOwl Vision

A threat intelligence service that includes a Dark web scanner as an information source.

3.SpyCloud ATO Prevention

Account takeover prevention with a threat intelligence database derived from Dark Web scans.

4.Digital Shadows SearchLight

A corporate brand protection service.

5.DigitalStakeout Scout

A data loss prevention system and threat protection system that includes a Dark Web scanner.

6.Alert Logic Dark Web Scanner

An account takeover prevention system based around a Dark Web scanner.

7.ACID Cyber Intelligence

A threat intelligence service that scans all known sources of illegal data.

8.WhatsUp Gold

A network traffic monitor that can identify traffic from the Tor network.

9.Dashlane Business

A comprehensive password protection system that includes a Dark Web scanner.

10.Have I Been Pwned?

A free email address-related Dark Web scan.