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It’s hard enough for financial sector organizations to monitor the open internet for online cyber threats. But what about the dark web – the shadowy sphere of the internet containing some of the most dangerous threats to cybersecurity? Let’s examine some of the threats from this hidden and highly-damaging information marketplace and learn why organizations can’t afford to have dark web be a blind spot in their monitoring operation.
The Dark Web and its Dangers
To understand the cybersecurity challenges posed by the dark web, it’s important to understand where this realm lies within the larger internet ecosystem of multiple web layers. For starters, there’s the surface web, which represents the vast majority of the internet; it’s what we see and scroll through every day when we search or browse the internet.
Still accessible, but not always indexed or easily searchable, is deep web content such as academic archives, research databases and other resources that are available-- if you know where to look. Then there’s the dark web, which allows users and website operators to remain anonymous and untraceable. Those operating on the dark web leverage special network interfaces like Tor (The Onion Router) to hide IP addresses and browsing activity by scrambling web traffic through multiple routers, or nodes.
This makes the dark web extremely hard to track with conventional monitoring tools and approaches. Making matters worse, the dark web’s anonymity makes it a magnet for malicious actors and black markets in stolen passwords, credentials, business data and sensitive financial information. All this spells trouble for financial firms unless they match the threat with robust dark web monitoring.
Dark Web Monitoring for Enhanced Visibility and Protection
Fortunately, the right MSP partnership can bring visibility and relief for organizations struggling to monitor the dark web to stop bad actors and targeted account threats. The best approaches will combine technology and human intelligence to easily identify exposed data; reduce the potential window for exploits with greater visibility; and provide IT and cybersecurity teams with actionable recommendations to get ahead of threats.
ECI’s own Dark Web Monitoring service is an industry leading collaboration with renowned security firm SpyCloud that continuously monitors the dark web to help reduce risk from account takeover. The solution combines powerful threat intelligence and dark web monitoring techniques with targeted scans for any company-specific data or credentials circulating there.
By scanning the dark web for login credentials, passwords and IP addresses, ECI’s Dark Web Monitoring solution can identify both ongoing and past data breaches while flagging any compromised systems. Better yet, the platform’s insights are highly actionable via early-warning breach detection and proactive steps such as automatic password resets to thwart the threat actors' attempts to do harm.
Ultimately, ECI’s Dark Web Monitoring solution helps clients cover all the cybersecurity bases by leveraging advanced technology and human intelligence for round-the-clock dark web monitoring, alerts, and proactive remediation to reduce the risk of account takeover. Learn more about ECI Dark Web Monitoring service here.
