FAQS

Our service is designed to help both large and small organizations detect and manage potential cyber threats to their organization. Dark Web ID leverages a combination of human and artificial intelligence that scours botnets, criminal chat rooms, blogs, websites and bulletin boards, Peer-to-Peer networks, forums, private networks, and other black market sites 24/7, 365 days a year to identify personally identifiable information.

Although these exposed credentials don’t signify that your organization is being directly targeted, the information is still readily available on the dark web. Leaving your organization vulnerable in the future if preemptive steps aren’t taken.

Dark Web ID focuses on cyber threats that are specific to your 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 and IP addresses. 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 IRC channels, 600,000 private websites, 600 twitter feeds, and execute 10,000 refined queries on a daily basis.

We allow for up to 5 personal email addresses per organization to be tracked.

• Keylogged/Phished – Indicator that there may be malware on an employee’s computer. • Breach – 3rd party website was hacked • Not Disclosed – Information is not available in data pull.

• ID Theft Forum - An IRC forum, chat room, or member only site (where credentials are required to gain access) where cyber criminals go to buy, sell, or trade PII and financial data. • Social Media – Typically Myspace or LinkedIn. • Webpage – 3rd party website where company email was used.

Password Criteria is designed to allow you or your clients to identify what their network password criteria is in order to put a higher alert status on credential exposures that may meet this criteria. It allows you to enter Minimum Lengths, number of letters, numbers, special characters and capital letters.

Typically this means the password is hashed/encrypted. These passwords can be “cracked” or decrypted through multiple websites available.

There are a variety of reasons hackers use fake emails, without speculating too far, these can be used for phishing type attacks. You should consider blocking these emails from your systems.

While some of the data we pull in might be considered older, employees still in many cases use the same or similar passwords. In regards to former employees, there is still a good opportunity to confirm you’ve shut down any privileges their account may still have.

To download the “TOR” browser and access the dark web, no. Many dark web IRCs and member driven marketplaces require privileged credentials to access. Again, I do not recommend that you access the dark web without an IT professional with dark web experience. If you do, remind the professional to use VPN.

Employees often use similar password throughout their work and personal networks. If your internal requirement is to have a capital letter and special character, it’s common practice for employees to use a password they are familiar with and add a capital letter and explanation mark. (Example: Exposed Password: cowboys, Variation: Cowboys!) Hackers are able to run brute force scripts that run hundreds of variations of passwords in order to find a match.

Once the data is posted within the dark web, it most likely will be copied and distributed (resold or traded) to a large number of cyber criminals, within a short period of time.

The standard user does NOT have access to view passwords.

A data breach is an incident where personally identifiable information (PII), such as an individual’s name and social security number, driver’s license number, medical record or financial record is potentially put at risk because of exposure.

Breaches most commonly happen through a cyber hack. Cyber criminals, typically aiming to profit off of stolen credentials, either hack into a user’s account with a login and password, trick a user into downloading malicious software, or otherwise gain access to a company or consumer’s internal data. Other causes of breaches include insider theft, accidental exposure, third party breach, or employee negligence.

Not necessarily, but consumers should take measures to ensure their PII is not used maliciously. There are several ways this can be done: by placing a fraud alert on their credit file; by placing a security freeze on their credit report; and by using credit and non-credit monitoring services.