For effective identity theft protection and/or prevention of data breaches and loss of crucial business secrets, it’s important for your cyber threat intelligence system to be able to identify where and when your sensitive information is being used or shared online - including the Dark Web.
The type of personal information under threat by identity thieves can include account details and user credentials, social security numbers, credit cards, credit report and credit file info, medical records, maiden name, social media logins, financial statements, and much more. Often, this information is collated and made available over the criminal ecosystem in the form of identity theft services. Dark Web monitoring is crucial for countering all of this.
This has become more complicated with the existence of the Dark Web; that corner of the internet, often hidden from law enforcement, where criminal networks can take advantage of anonymity and make a profit from your personal or business data. User account details and other information can be sold or exchanged by specific fraud actors across criminal sites.
Consequently, keeping track of user credential breach protection, personal information and your organisation’s information on the web through Dark Web surveillance is an extremely time-consuming process. On top of that, to keep personal information safe from data leaks, you need a threat intelligence system to monitor the Dark Web, so that the problems can be remedied quickly.
What is Dark Web monitoring?
The answer is in the name. Dark Web monitoring is a method of cyber intelligence gathering that automatically scans websites, marketplaces and forums on the Dark Web, around the clock, 24x7, for any incidents of your user credentials and other data appearing where it should not.
Why can’t I do this myself?
First of all, it can be risky to browse the Dark Web to obtain cyber intelligence. Clicking on the wrong link or visiting the wrong page can result in malware being pushed from a Dark Web site to your corporate network, exposing your user credentials and other data.
Secondly, it’s far too time-consuming for a single person to effectively perform the role of an identity theft resource centre by monitoring for criminal activity and building up an intelligence database. As a start, to build up that intelligence database, you would need to register for each site and regularly login to search for your data on these sites. Then, you would need to be able to spend your time investigating potential criminal activity and remedying problems instead of just searching for their existence. Even worse, many of these sites require approved login credentials simply to get access to the data. You could theoretically do this on your own, however, the sheer amount of time required is, well… there are simply not enough hours in the day to do this manually.
What makes monitoring and intelligence database building even more complicated is that the criminal landscape is always changing. Sites on the Dark Web are often fleeting in nature. Data (including login credentials) can be shared, and then quickly disappear or be moved to another site. It is virtually impossible to keep track of these on your own.
Automated Dark Web monitoring
With BreachAlert Dark Web monitoring, Skurio’s sophisticated SaaS software can automatically scan to detect incidences of your data appearing on the Dark Web. Instead of occasionally checking for the usage of your data, Skurio monitors the Dark Web for any occurrences of your information appearing, and scrapes and stores data that should not be available outside your company network security. We store all content locally, so if on the chance that the original site or post disappears, you will only need to look at the safe copy without needing to connect to the (potentially risky) Dark Web site.
Hackers and other bad actors don’t work the normal work hours that your business does; they can be anywhere in the world. With automation, you can monitor the Dark Web 24x7. By having a solid automation system in place, you can be notified the moment the data appears and receive critical alerts the moment your data is discovered so that you can take action.
By working with Skurio, you can attain peace of mind knowing that the job of finding incidences of your sensitive data on the Dark Web is being done for you!
