The dark web is infamous for having a rather nefarious reputation in modern culture. And it’s easy to see why.
With the whole spectrum of illicit, banned, and fraudulent products for sale within underground markets (from firearms and illegal substances to stolen data and fraudulent passports) the dark web can act as a cybercriminal’s playground—and the everyday business’ worst nightmare.
This is because stolen business data (including credentials, credit card details, intellectual property, and sensitive information) often sells like hotcakes. And with threat actors looking to leverage this data to launch account compromise, ransomware attacks, and more, it’s vital that you not only know which pieces of data have materialized on the dark web, but also how they’re going to be leveraged.
So, how can your business fight back?
Throughout this article, we’ll take a look at “dark web monitoring”, a type of service designed to protect businesses against dark web activity. We’ll explore what it is, how it works, and whether your business needs it.
What Is Dark Web Monitoring?
Dark web monitoring is a service that continuously searches for stolen pieces of data, attempts at fraud and impersonation, planned attacks and exploits, and more within the depths of the dark web.
These services are designed to covertly infiltrate underground communities and webpages, extract relevant information, and alert you in real time—so that your businesses can take the right preventative measures before you’re hit by an attack.
We should note that there’s a significant difference between dark web monitoring and dark web scanning. The former means to surveil the dark web 24/7/365, whereas the latter is instead more of a one-off activity that captures a picture of the dark web at one singular point in time.
So, in this article, we’re dealing with dark web monitoring. But how does it work?
How Does Dark Web Monitoring Work?
Dark web monitoring solutions generally work by continuously monitoring a range of dark web sources, analyzing identified data for relevance, and alerting the effected parties if relevant information is found.
Let’s take a deeper dive into how this works.
1. Visibility Across A Range Of Sources
Dark web monitoring solutions often function as kinds of search engines that enable you to access hidden areas of the dark web without needing to actually access the dark web itself.
These should provide access to data across a range of dark web (as well as surface and deep web) sources, including:
- Darknet webpages
- Forums
- Chat rooms
- Marketplaces
- IRC channels
- Paste sites
- Social media
- Blogs and news sites
- Messaging apps
The number and types of sources available vary for each type of solution, so we’d always recommend checking that these align with your requirements before purchasing.
2. Continuous Monitoring And Analysis
The cornerstone of a good dark web monitoring solution is its ability to continuously monitor a range of dark web sources (normally through the use of crawlers, scrapers, and scanners) and analyze content in real time to identify relevant risks to your business.
To analyze data, some solutions might use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms, while others might leverage human intelligence. Some might even combine the two, giving you the best of both worlds in terms of efficiency and quality.
As well as automated continuous monitoring, some vendors might offer a managed service where they assign a dedicated expert or team of researchers to infiltrate dark web communities and extract relevant information on your behalf. These will be deeply experienced individuals that know how not to stand out on the dark web and exactly where to look for the right information.
3. Alerting
Most dark web monitoring solutions enable you to set up real-time alerts that are triggered by specific criteria, enabling you to act quickly if and when a threat or piece of breached data is discovered.
Good examples of common criteria are keywords. Teams can set up specific keywords or phrases that their solution should look out for when analyzing dark web data, and if relevant information that contains those keywords is found, they’ll be notified immediately. Other examples include phrases and images.
Some solutions can even go as far as alerting specific users as and when they discover that that user’s credentials have been compromised on the dark web, and prompt them to change their passwords immediately.
4. Reporting
A crucial feature of any dark web monitoring solution is its reporting capability. This enables admins to see their organization’s overall health and risk score, monitor specific assets, investigate alerts and customize alert triggers, follow threats as they develop, and more.
This capability should come as part of a built-in central dashboard, which often includes multiple easy-to-customize views, so teams can ensure they have all the information they need all in one place. This also makes it easy to report current state and progress to C-suite executives and other teams across the business.
5. Facilitating Response
While dark web monitoring solutions lack the ability to address or remediate threats within the platform itself (a few might offer takedown services to remove harmful content, but this feature isn’t common to all solutions), many integrate seamlessly with third-party security platforms to do this.
For example, data collected by dark web monitoring solutions can be fed directly into cyber threat intelligencetools, security information and event management (SIEM) platforms, and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solutions. This means relevant data can flow directly into response workflows and inform wider business processes.
Does Your Business Need Dark Web Monitoring?
So, now that we know what dark web monitoring is and how it works, let’s tackle our third and final question: Does your business need it?
To answer that, we’ll need to take a look at both the benefits and drawbacks of investing in one of these solutions.
The Benefits Of Dark Web Monitoring
Here are four benefits of investing in a dark web monitoring solution:
1. Discover Ongoing And Planned Attacks
For many businesses, the dark web is their blind spot—making it an attractive environment for threat actors to buy, sell, and trade business information, plan attacks and exploits, and much more.
And, while you might have a strong cybersecurity plan in place to keep you safe against sophisticated attacks, how can you protect against threats that you don’t know exist—threats that purposely hide in your blind spot to remain undetected?
Having a dark web monitoring solution in place means you’ll have eyes and ears in the deepest corners of the dark web that continuously listen out for signifiers that your organization is a potential target—or even that an undetected attack has already taken place.
2. Detect Data Breaches
Dark web marketplaces are hotspots for the sale of stolen business data—this includes credentials, employee and customer personally identifiable information, proprietary information, and financial details.
And, having your breached data for sale on the dark web can lead to disastrous consequences. The average cost of a data breach, as of 2021, stands at a massive $4.24 million, and undiscovered data breaches can also lead to damage to brand reputation, litigation, fines from compliance regulators, and more.
For example, failing to keep customer personal data safe could put you in breach of the GDPR regulation and cost you up to €20 million or 4% of your annual turnover, whichever is higher.
Having a dark web monitoring solution in place means having a way to continuously search for and discover breached data before it can be leveraged against your business—and save you a whole lot of pain further down the line.
3. Respond More Quickly To Breaches
Did you know that more than 75% of compromised credentials that are reported to victim organizations by law enforcement are actually reported after it’s too late? While the average time that it takes for an organization to identify and contain a breach is 287 days.
So, unless you have some way to detect breaches early on, by the time you hear that your data has been breached chances are the damage has already been done. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Dark web monitoring tools can alert you as soon as it detects any of your breached data on the dark web, enabling you to quickly take action to notify any affected parties and perform remediation tasks.
This is particularly vital if you handle a lot of customer data. You really want them to hear about the breach from you and to be assured that it’s all under control, rather than from some clickbait article on the internet that’s designed to terrify them and cause uproar.
4. Preventing Future Attacks
Keeping your organization safe against malicious activity is not only about how you respond to threats, but how you prevent them, too.
Dark web monitoring platforms can give provide you with relevant intelligence about not only both potential and successful attacks against your organization, but also how these attacks commonly function—including tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), infrastructure, tools, and more.
You can leverage this information to inform and strengthen your cybersecurity strategy, fixing any vulnerabilities before they are exploited and putting the right protections in place against the tactics that threat actors are likely to use.
The Drawbacks Of Dark Web Monitoring
So, now that we’ve looked at the benefits, let’s look at three drawbacks of investing in a dark web monitoring solution.
1. It Isn’t A Silver-Bullet Solution
When it comes to cybersecurity, there is no silver-bullet solution that will magically fix all of your problems and protect you from any and every type of attack imaginable. This is especially true of dark web monitoring.
Dark web monitoring certainly won’t protect you from the vast majority of attacks you might face—it’s more a helpful add-on, a crystal ball to help you predict where attacks might come from and where the dangers lie.
And, especially today, with cybersecurity budgets stretched thinly and analysts worn out, we understand if you’re looking to focus on more imminent threats and critical solutions. But if you do have the resources and the bandwidth to take on a dark web monitoring solution, it can be a real asset to your stack.
2. It’s Impossible To Monitor The Entire Dark Web
It’s important to understand that each solution will have its limits as to the underground areas that it can reach. Even those that offer the most comprehensive list of data sources will still have blind spots.
It’s impossible for a tool to reach every nook and cranny of the dark web because, well, nobody knows for sure how big the dark web actually is. There will inevitable be some hidden areas that a tool simply can’t reach.
So, we recommend keeping this in mind when deciding whether dark web monitoring is for you. And, if you do decide to invest in a solution, make sure you check that it can access the sources that you’d like to pull data from.
Summary
So, dark web monitoring solutions are an excellent option for organizations looking for that added layer of security—to be able to predict future attacks, discover breached data, and uncover threat actor TTPs.
We recommend carefully analyzing your current needs and requirements to determine whether dark web monitoring is for you.
And if you do decide that you’re interested in investing in a dark web monitoring solution, we’ve put together a list of the ten best solutions on the market:
