Professional Dark Web Monitoring
The internet is a vast, cavernous space. It’s a giant marketplace, a place where we connect with friends, where we learn, where we do business, buy products and waste time.
The internet has brought a lot of joy to our lives, but like with most things there is a dark underbelly that we all need to be wary of.
Enter the dark web.
The dark web is the Wild West of the internet, with plenty of dangers afoot. You can only get there if you know where to look, and once you’re there, you need to be awares.
To borrow a quote from Obi-Wan Kenobi: “you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy” than on the dark web.
Enquire with us today about dark web monitoring, or read on to understand more about what that entails, what the dark web is and how our dark web scans can benefit your business.
Before we go any further, let’s take a look at what we mean by ‘the dark web’.
What is the Dark Web?
For those unacquainted with the shadowlands of the internet, the dark web is the part of the internet that is not accessible via search engines.
If you are a regular user of the internet, you’re probably familiar with Wikipedia, Google, Facebook. You may buy products from Amazon, or do your food shopping at a supermarket website. When you can't remember the name of that actor, you may find yourself on iMDB.
These classic websites are part of what is known as the ‘surface web’. This is the part of the internet that the vast majority of us use. We buy clothes there, share videos, read articles, all of it. But this only constitutes about 5% of the internet.
That’s right, the place where you likely spend 100% of your time on the internet, is only 5% of the whole thing.
It helps to think of the surface web as the tip of the iceberg. Below the water is a completely different story.
The dark web accounts for just under 50% of the internet.
The reason why this part of the internet is in the dark is because of the rampant illegality that occurs there. You can buy drugs, weapons, fake currency, passports, identities and basically anything that is illegal, on websites that barely look any different to Amazon.
The only way to access the dark web is to use something called a Tor browser. What this does is essentially mask your online identity by ‘scrambling’ your IP address across thousands and thousands of proxy servers around the world.
If it’s illegal, you can find it on the dark web.
What is Dark Web Monitoring?
Dark web monitoring refers to accessing this most inaccessible part of the internet to try and pick up on chatter or activity that could be potentially harmful to you.
Once on the dark web, you search for and attempt to find personal, sensitive information because if it’s on the dark web, then it can be used against you.
Health & Security Network Audit
Why Should You Care?
So all this is well and good, but why should you, as a business, care about dark web monitoring?
A common practice on the dark web is for hackers to obtain passwords, credit card information, financial data, operational data, intellectual property and then make it available for purchase.
If a competitor or bad-faith actor was to access this information, they may be able to cause untold damage to your business. This information is often readily available and the means by which people gather this information are becoming more and more sophisticated all the time.
These days, you can be breached without ever even knowing you’ve been approached. And by the time you realise, it’s normally because it’s too late.
Benefits of Dark Web Monitoring
There is one overarching benefit of dark web monitoring which is the safety of your business and corporate identity.
As mentioned, if your details are available on the dark web, unless you know how to go onto the dark web, and then have the tools to monitor it for your information, then you will never know that this information is out there to be used against you.
For your peace of mind, for the sake of your business, staying one step ahead of hackers and competitors can be the difference between business life or death.
Enquire with us today to know more about our dark web monitoring services. We offer the full gamut of IT support and security services like network auditing, onsite IT support, offsite data storage, web hosting and more.
Other services of interest:
