Dark Web Monitoring is a service offered by CloudTech24 to detect and prevent identity, data, and credential theft by monitoring your business domains and IP addresses. As a part of the service, we match your business data to the dark web, scanning specifically for any data breach (e.g. credit cards numbers, phone numbers, social media details) and relaying this information to you so that you can take action.
The CloudTech24 service detects any potential breaches and provides notifications of any information that is compromised. This can assist you in securing and remediating system access and stopping potential threats in their tracks.
Why is dark web monitoring important?
Your digital credentials (such as your usernames and passwords for various websites and applications) help to connect you and your employees to important parts of your business. Whether they are used for online services or particular business applications, these credentials are something that must be kept safe. Behind these services may be access to financial data, customer data or other aspects of your business that you don’t want anyone outside of your business aware of.
Unfortunately, from time to time, these digital credentials can be leveraged by criminals and are among the some of the most valuable assets found on the Dark Web, where it is estimated that over 50% of all sites are used for criminal activities. If your cyber criminals have access to these compromised credentials, it can lead to stolen data, business or personal financial loss, and can certainly cause harm to your company’s reputation.
What’s included in a Dark Web Monitoring Service?
With our monitoring service, we can help secure your business by providing a 24/7 monitoring system that utilises both human and automated intelligence to perform checks against millions of both dark web and open web sources. This can include botnets, criminal chat rooms, peer-to-peer networks, malicious websites and blogs, bulletin boards, and illegal black markets. Within this information we look for a wide range of data, from personal information such as e-mail addresses and credit card numbers, to social security information and domains relating to your web pages.
Through this service, we work to identify, analyse, and proactively monitor dark web for your organisation’s compromised or stolen employee and customer data, including but not limited to:
- Email addresses
- Passwords
- Date of Births
- Addresses
- Drivers Licence Details
- Security Numbers
Within this service, we can also provide continuous monitoring of more business-related information such as your internet facing and office IP addresses and monitoring of high risk and key employee personal email accounts. This helps you go that one step further to protect company information and credentials.
How Can I Further Protect Myself?
Although there are certain things that you can do to prevent your information from being stolen in the first place, such as not clicking on phishing emails, cyber criminals can often outsmart us. However, there are things that can be done to minimise the impact should you discover that your information has in fact been stolen.
- Change your passwords – Not only should you change your passwords regularly, but you should also refrain from using the same (or similar) passwords across various platforms/accounts. Use of a password manager helps to create secure passwords and decreases the need to remember multiple, complex login information.
- Search the open web – if your personal information is available on search engines and sites that you do not wish it to be, ask for it to be removed. There are laws that govern your control of your personal information.
- Monitor the dark web – dark web data is on the dark web for a reason. Data breaches occur every day and it is important to be aware whether you have compromised credentials that are available to dark web users.
Frequently Asked Questions about Dark Web Monitoring:
Please see below for some common questions on our dark web monitoring. If you would prefer to speak to someone then give us a call and speak to one of our team in our head office to discuss your requirements and learn how our security experts support other businesses in the United Kingdom (UK).
WHAT IS THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTINUOUS DARK WEB MONITORING?
Like most assurance testing; as soon as it is complete, it is out of date until the next periodic review. Our continuous dark web monitoring ensures that you always have real time visibility and notifications of dark and open web events performed by our dark web monitoring team.
IS IT LEGAL TO SURF THE DARK WEB?
Using the Tor network to access the dark web is not an illegal activity, although there is content and commercial sites that sell products that are illegal. Sites such as these sell a wealth of personal information, often exfiltrated in a cyber attack.
DO YOU OFFER A FREE DARK WEB ASSESSMENT?
The best solution for your business depends on the size of the business, the network architecture and the resource available. CloudTech24 offer NGAV resale and also deliver as a part of a fully managed NGAV service to provide our clients with the technologies and expertise with our trusted processes and procedures for endpoint security.
DOES MY COMPANY NEED TO WATCH OUT FOR THE DARK WEB?
All companies need to be aware of the threats from the dark web. All businesses and individuals can be targeted at any moment. Company data leaked into the dark web is not ideal at all – it is an intimidating space filled with unknowns and hard to track what is happening with it, once the data has entered. We therefore recommend all businesses protect themselves from the dark web and ensure no data is compromised.
HOW MUCH DOES IT COST FOR ONGOING DARK WEB MONITORING?
We do not have a set cost for our dark web monitoring and all our customers will receive a bespoke quotation for our support. This will factor in how big your organisation is, how many devices you have and what these are, what your current IT set up is etc.
CAN I GET ‘HAVE I BEEN PWNED?’ (HIBP) FOR BUSINESS?
HIBP is generally focussed on the breach of information on the dark web. In other words, you cannot get HIBP for business per se but you can do so with CloudTech24. Click here to learn more.
DOES DARK WEB MONITORING CONTRIBUTE TO THREAT INTELLIGENCE?
Absolutely – threat intelligence is a large topic, however understanding the availability of data on the dark web can form a piece of the puzzle.
CAN YOU REMOVE INFORMATION FROM THE DARK WEB?
In short, no, you cannot remove information from the dark web.
What you can do is safeguard against the consequences of a data breach by monitoring what data is available and take action.
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE DEEP WEB AND THE DARK WEB?
The term ‘deep web’ refers to any information available on the open web that isn’t indexed by search engines.
The dark web is harder to access; it sits behind layers of anonymity, can only be accessed via very limited channels, and it is designed to obscure the often illicit nature of the information available.
The deep and dark web both offer their share of issues, however the dark web often raises more pertinent concerns.
