Dark Web FAQ
In a world where information flows freely on the surface web, the dark web remains a mysterious and enigmatic corner of the internet. This space is shrouded in secrecy, often associated with illicit activities and intrigue. If you’ve ever been curious about what the dark web is, how it operates, and the truths and myths that surround it, you’ve come to the right place. Read the frequently asked questions about the dark web below.
What Is The Dark Web?
The dark web is a hidden universe contained within the “deep web” — a sublayer of the internet that is hidden from conventional search engines. Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo only search .04% of the indexed or “surface” internet.
The other 99.96% of the web consists of databases, private academic and government networks, and the dark web. The dark web is estimated at 550 times larger than the surface eeb and growing. Because you can operate anonymously, the dark web holds a wealth of stolen data and illegal activity.
Does The Identification Of My Organization's Exposed Credentials Mean We Are Being Targeted By Hackers?
While we can’t say definitively that the data we’ve discovered already has been used to exploit your organization, the fact that we can identify this data should be very concerning. Organizations should consult their internal or external IT and/or security teams to determine if they have suffered a cyber incident or data breach.
How Does Dark Web ID Help Protect My Organization?
Our service is designed to help organizations detect and mitigate cyber threats that leverage stolen email addresses and passwords.
Dark Web ID leverages a combination of human and artificial intelligence that scour botnets, criminal chat rooms, blogs, websites, bulletin boards, peer-to-peer networks, forums, private networks and other blackmarket sites 24/7, 365 days a year to identify stolen credentials and other personally identifiable information (PII).
Some of the Alerts I See Include Employees That Are No Longer Working For Us. Does This Mean We Are Not at Risk?
While employees may have moved on from your organization, their company-issued credentials still can be active and valid within the third-party systems they used while employed.
In many cases, the third-party systems or databases that have been compromised have been in existence for 10-plus years holding millions of “zombie” accounts that can be used to exploit an organization. Discovery of credentials from legacy employees should be a good reminder to confirm you’ve shut down any active internal and third-party accounts that could be used for exploitation.
How Are The Stolen Or Exposed Credentials Found On The Dark Web?
Dark Web ID focuses on cyberthreats that are specific to our clients’ environments. We monitor the dark web and the criminal hacker underground for exposure of our clients’ credentials to malicious individuals. We accomplish this by looking specifically for our clients’ top-level email domains. When a credential is identified, we harvest it.
While we harvest data from typical hacker sites like Pastebin, a lot of our data originates from sites that require credibility or a membership within the hacker community to enter. To that end, we monitor over 500 distinct internet relay chatroom (IRC) channels, 600,000 private websites, 600 X (formerly Twitter) feeds and execute 10,000 refined queries daily.
If Your Personal Data is Found on the Dark Web, Can it be Removed?
Built by offensive security experts, the Huntress platform allows us to find and disrupt attackers before they can cause widespread damage. The Huntress ThreatOps team of experts is ready to respond to any incident, offering 24/7 support. That means they are ready to respond if your server starts getting encrypted, even at 2 a.m. on a Saturday.