
In this blog we discuss why the dark web is a threat to organizations and how dark web monitoring and investigation can keep businesses safe.
How to keep your business safe from the dark web
The dark web is a portion of the internet hidden from traditional search engines, and is notorious for concealing illegal activity, including, but not limited to, hacking tools and the sale of stolen data on dark web marketplaces. For businesses, this can mean exposure to data breaches, ransomware attacks, or intellectual property theft, all of which can have significant financial impacts as well as causing damage to a businesses’ reputation.
Being aware of these threats is critical. When organizations are aware of where the risks lie, they can focus on bolstering security in particular areas – whether that’s improving data encryption, tightening access controls, or patching software vulnerabilities. Having this intel, along with more “traditional” cybersecurity creates a layered security posture that’s much harder for cybercriminals to penetrate.
In this blog we will discuss the threats from the dark web and how organizations can mitigate the risk.
Potential threats the dark web poses to businesses
The dark web poses several threats to organizations, primarily around data breaches, intellectual property theft, and exposure to targeted cyberattacks. Here are just some of the threats organizations face from the dark web.
Data breaches
Data breaches make up a large portion of threats from the dark web, with cybercriminals using the dark web as a marketplace for selling stolen data. This stolen data can include employee records, financial data, and important business information.
When this information is sold or traded and falls into the hands of a cybercriminal, organizations can face not only financial losses but legal consequences, regulatory fines, and loss of trust among customers and partners.
Identity theft and dark web fraud
In a world where organizations use more tools and services that are connected to the internet, identity theft is a serious concern, and the dark web is full of cybercriminals looking to exploit personal information.
Cybercriminals can use many methods and tactics to steal identities including phishing attacks, social engineering, malware, and data breaches.
The personal information gathered during these attacks can be used to impersonate business executives to:
- Open credit accounts and run up large debts.
- Sensitive data being leaked, such as private messages, photos or videos, leading to embarrassment, harassment, or blackmail.
- Reputational damage if personal or sensitive information becomes public.
Intellectual property theft
For companies relying on technology or trade secrets, the dark web poses the risk of intellectual property theft. Criminals can expose or sell sensitive research, patented designs, or product blueprints, allowing competitors or malicious actors to replicate innovations or exploit vulnerabilities. This kind of leak can tarnish an organization’s competitive advantage and hinder its market position.
Targeted malware and ransomware attacks
The dark web is a place where hackers share tools, tips, and techniques for breaching organizations, including targeted malware and ransomware attacks. With knowledge and resources readily available, attackers are better equipped to launch targeted campaigns against organizations. For example, they might find passwords or exploit vulnerabilities in specific software versions used by the company, making their attacks more effective.
Best practices for protection from the dark web
While traditional cybersecurity methods go a way to protecting organizations from cyberattacks and helps to instill a proactive approach, dark web monitoring and investigation tools go one step further and help organizations undermine the anonymity of the dark web that cybercriminals thrive on and regain the advantage over dark web criminals.
Automated data collection
Content on the dark web can appear and disappear in a very short space of time, making manual monitoring neither practical nor sufficient to gain insights from.
Automated data collection is a critical feature of effective dark web protection tools, allowing organizations to continuously gather intelligence and maintain a robust understanding of potential threats. This capability ensures no stone is left unturned, providing comprehensive coverage and actionable insights into malicious activity.
Automated data collection enables:
- Comprehensive coverage: Automated data collection ensures no potential threat goes unnoticed, enabling businesses to identify risks early and minimize blind spots.
- Real-time monitoring: With automated systems in place, threats are flagged as they emerge, rather than relying on delayed, manual discovery.
- Efficiency: By automating data collection, security teams save time and resources, allowing them to focus on high-priority issues rather than sifting through raw data.
Live and historical data
When it comes to monitoring the dark web, the ability to view live activity is essential – but that’s only part of the equation. The most effective dark web monitoring tools don’t just provide insight into what’s happening now, they also offer historical data. Past activity often holds the key to understanding dark web trends, uncovering ongoing threats, and predicting future risks. It also helps security teams with incident response, and getting a clear picture of what happened in the run up to a cyberattack and how the cybercriminal infiltrated the organization.
For example, our dark web protection tools provide access to over 15 years of live and historic data, including content that has been deleted or is no longer publicly accessible. This unique feature provides organizations with a powerful advantage over potential hackers. Combining real-time monitoring with a rich archive of historic intelligence ensures that potential threats are picked up and gives organizations the opportunity to build proactive cybersecurity plans.
AI-powered language translation
The dark web operates on a global scale, with cybercriminals communicating and conducting activities in multiple languages. Threats to your business may not originate from the same country as your organization but from halfway across the world. This is where AI-powered language translation becomes an invaluable component of dark web protection tools, enabling businesses to identify, analyze, and respond to threats regardless of language barriers.
The dark web is dominated by several key languages, with the top 10 most commonly used being:
- English
- Russian
- German
- French
- Spanish
- Bulgarian
- Indonesian
- Turkish
- Italian
- Dutch
After English, Russian is by far the most popular language on the dark web, accounting for 66 percent of non-English language content. By comparison, this is followed by German (at nine percent) and French (at seven percent). Outside of the top 10 listed above, each language’s share is below one percent.
Without the ability to translate and analyze these languages, businesses risk missing critical intelligence about threats targeting their operations.
How the translation is undertaken also makes a big difference. At Searchlight Cyber, we use a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system – a type of AI that isn’t simply translating one word at a time, but takes the sentence as a whole and translates into the target language the way a professional human translator would. This vastly increases the accuracy of the translation as the true meaning of the sentence is captured.
Threat mapping and guidance
The dark web is vast, making it challenging to understand where threats are coming from and how they might evolve. Effective dark web monitoring for businesses provides mapping and guidance to help organizations identify potential risks and mitigate them before they escalate. For example, a framework for understanding and categorizing cyber threats is the MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Matrix.
The MITRE ATT&CK framework is a globally recognized repository of adversarial tactics, techniques, and procedures, organized across a timeline of a typical cyberattack. From reconnaissance to data exfiltration, this framework helps organizations map cyberthreats to specific attacker behaviors. By understanding these patterns, security teams can better anticipate and respond to potential threats before they occur.
When looking for a dark web protection tool, organizations should be looking for tools that integrate frameworks such as MITRE as well as other context and guidance into the solution.
For example, organizations can detect when their IPs, domains, or other digital assets are being mentioned in dark web forums, signaling the reconnaissance phase of an attack. This allows businesses to stay ahead of potential attacks, enabling them to reduce response times and prevent damage before it occurs.
Dark web traffic monitoring
A sudden surge in Tor traffic to a business’ network is a clear warning sign that the organization may soon be under attack. But if an organization doesn’t know about the surge, how can they prevent the attack from happening?
Organizations should be seeking dark web monitoring tools that automate alerts to detect Tor traffic to and from their network. This approach allows security teams to effectively remediate attacks and proactively identify and defend against malware installation, insider threats, and data theft rather than attempting to minimize their impact.
Good examples of dark web traffic monitoring tools will automatically show organizations all live and historical traffic records of what’s happening on their network. Security teams can then easily spot malicious activity like large downloads or uploads from your dark web traffic logs, so action can be taken long before attackers get anywhere near the network.
Keeping ahead of the dark web
Dark web intelligence plays an important role in preempting cyberattacks by identifying early signs of malicious activity. The first step all organizations should take to spot the early signs of their exposure and potential cyberattacks is to collect dark web intelligence. Cybersecurity teams can only take mitigating actions to reduce dark web risks if they can identify where on the dark web they are being targeted. Understanding their points of exposure and mitigating their cybersecurity risk will help organizations minimize the financial, reputational, and legal impact of cyberattacks.
While dark web monitoring offers multiple benefits, it’s crucial to remember that it’s part of an advanced enterprise cybersecurity posture and doesn’t replace your current cybersecurity strategy or infrastructure. Using dark web traffic monitoring as part of our cybersecurity plan can take any business from being cyber reactive to cyber progressive. Doing this gives cybersecurity teams the invaluable insight they need to change and update their infrastructure as they see potential threats appearing.