Do your cyber security managed services include Dark Web Monitoring?
For cybercriminals, the personal, health, and payment card information of their unsuspecting victims can be extraordinarily valuable. For example, selling a batch of stolen credit card numbers with expiration dates and CVV codes, a batch of compromised email accounts with passwords, or a batch of Social Security Numbers with names and addresses can lead to a quick and profitable payday with minimal effort. Similarly, buying this information can provide a criminal with all the access he needs in order to breach a company’s network, obtain a fraudulent prescription, or conduct other illicit activity. Thankfully, in a normal marketplace, such activity would be easy for law enforcement to detect and prevent. But cybercriminals don’t play by the rules, and they’ve adapted by migrating their markets to a place that virtually guarantees anonymity—the Dark Web.
What Is the Dark Web?
The Dark Web is the portion of the World Wide Web that runs atop darknets. These are special networks that are overlaid onto the Internet but are inaccessible without special software, configurations, or authorization to access. Darknets are not indexed by search engines such as Google, which is part of the reason they’re difficult to track. Cybercriminals take advantage of this cover and establish darknet markets to buy, sell, and trade illegal drugs, weapons, and stolen information. This affords them a greater degree of protection than they’d otherwise have.
The Dark Web, however, isn’t an impenetrable fortress. Years ago, the banking industry led the charge to find evidence of stolen personal and payment card information in these darknet markets (banks were, after all, the ones who bore the brunt of damages from fraudulent purchases). A study conducted by PrivacyAffairs collected hundreds of examples of data being sold on the dark web and discovered most on average your data is worth about $1,275 on the dark web. The technology sector got on board with these techniques, and now Dark Web Monitoring services are commonplace. Corsica’s service, for example, provides 24x7x365 monitoring of darknet resources such as:
- Hidden chatrooms
- Unindexed sites
- Private networks
- Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks
- Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels
- Social media platforms
- Black market sites
- Botnets
These are the places where your users’ account names, passwords, and other stolen information are likely to be bought, sold, and traded. By shining a light into these crevices, Corsica is able to detect credentials stolen from your users, work with them to remediate, and ultimately protect your organization from the unauthorized access and data loss that could stem from the initial theft of credentials.
Partnering with Corsica helps your organization remain secure while you focus on serving your own customers. If you are interested in learning more about our Dark Web Monitoring or other cybersecurity services, please schedule a call with one of our security professionals.
Ross Filipek
Ross is the CISO at Corsica Technologies. He has achieved CCIE Security and CISSP certifications, an MBA from the University of Notre Dame, and has 20 years of experience in the fields of computer and network security engineering and consulting. Ross provides virtual CISO services for clients and helps them to identify information security risks and implement administrative, procedural, and technical controls to mitigate. He works effectively with both technical and managerial personnel and is a trusted resource for our clients.
