One key to improving your cybersecurity posture is leveraging threat intelligence. Understanding our adversaries and their tactics makes it much easier to develop mitigation strategies and respond to incidents more efficiently.

Many hackers want to avoid exposing themselves on the open web. However, they still need to communicate with each other, exchange information, and even offer criminal services or leaked data. To do this without drawing too much attention, they often rely on anonymous networks or private messaging services to build entire communities focused on crime.

Deep & Dark Web monitoring is how businesses can watch over these criminal spaces to gather information on emerging threats. This practice has several benefits but can also be very challenging due to the surprisingly high volume of available data — especially when the monitoring effort encompasses private or exclusive channels.

Given the data analysis challenge involved, Artificial Intelligence can offer enormous value in this endeavor. It can enable actionable insights and predictions based on the data available on the Dark Web. The result is a more proactive cybersecurity posture and a safer business.

What is Dark Web Monitoring for?

The primary goal of Dark Web spaces is to remain hidden, meaning they cannot be found using traditional search engines. Since this "feature" attracts a significant number of criminals and illegal activities, Dark Web Monitoring seeks to close this visibility gap that exists due to the very nature of this environment.

The information available on the Dark Web can be unpredictable — which is also one of the reasons why AI is so helpful in its analysis. Unlike traditional algorithms, AI has the capability to highlight important information even when it is presented in unexpected ways.

Nevertheless, there are a few common threads in the information exchanged by criminals on the Dark Web.

• Data Leaks. Attackers share, trade, or sell data stolen from companies, including personal information (PII), credit cards, and publicly available data collected from social networks and other public websites.
  
  
• Tools. Hackers share and offer malware, affiliate programs (such as "Ransomware-as-a-Service"), and other hacking tools that can be useful in their criminal activities.
  
  
• Crime Services. When criminals are not selling their tools, they often sell their "services."
  
  
• Credentials, Tokens, Cookies, Passwords. In addition to personal data, hackers often sell credentials for other criminals to use in other attacks or fraud. These credentials can come from data leaks, malware stealer, or credential stuffing (revalidation).
  
  
• Remote Access and Computing Resources. They may also sell access to systems that have been infected with remote administration tools or malware.
  
  
• Campaigns. Criminals engage in casual conversations about their latest exploits or other attack campaigns.
  
  

So, how can you use this information to improve your cybersecurity?

Incident Prevention and Detection

Data leaks, tools, crime services, and credentials are often linked to security incidents—either ones that have already happened or are yet to happen. With this information, mitigation strategies can be adopted to prevent future incidents. Sometimes, information on the Dark Web can be linked to resources on the Surface (open) Web so that you can respond with a takedown.

Ideally, a Dark Web Monitoring solution should allow you to receive insights on several relevant topics, such as your particular web properties and technology stack. AI-powered prioritization enables you to use these insights to quickly move forward with patches or other changes that will thwart attackers.

The expertise of human analysts is also essential to fine-tune the scanning activity so you are notified of imminent attacks or fraud attempts.

Supply Chain Security

You can monitor your brand or business to be notified when attackers discuss any campaigns related to you. However, you can also extend this monitoring to include critical suppliers and vendors. 

The same applies to data leaks. By checking datasets shared among criminals, you may discover that a business partner has not adequately protected your data. Privacy laws often require you to notify users when their data has been leaked, even when it occurred by a third party.

This monitoring may give you grounds to pursue legal action against a vendor or take any other measures that may be appropriate. Similarly, it may also provide the evidence you need to confidently state that the leak did not originate from your business.

Without this, you are left with little to no visibility into how criminals managed to obtain this information.

Understanding the Attackers

Criminals' tools and services on the Dark Web reveal many insights into their Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs). When you know you defend against real threats, you can be much more confident in your decisions to protect your business.

The dark web discussions you will see — and the AI insights that can be generated from them — provide a solid ground for adopting new processes or discarding old ones. 

The Role of MSSPs in Dark Web Monitoring

Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) are essential to enhancing organizations' cybersecurity defenses, particularly those lacking the resources to manage such tasks in-house. MSSPs leverage Dark Web Monitoring to provide their customers with continuous surveillance of potential threats.

By using AI-powered tools to analyze vast amounts of data, MSSPs can quickly identify and prioritize emerging risks. This enables them to offer timely and actionable intelligence to customers, ensuring proactive threat mitigation.

Furthermore, MSSPs can tailor their monitoring services to fit the specific needs and threat landscapes of various industries, such as healthcare and finance, thus providing a more customized and effective defense strategy.

Finding Threats on the Dark Web with AI

A powerful Dark Web Monitoring platform will have access to many services or websites, processing thousands of signals daily. Still, there are four significant issues:

Finding relevant data in unusual formats or contexts

A brand may be represented by its logo or other visual elements. Some conversations among criminals may leverage audio or video (a crime tutorial, for instance). Simple text scanners cannot process this.

Visual computing, audio transcription, and natural language processing (NLP) are all AI-powered technologies that overcome these challenges. 

Today, 25% of Deep & Dark Web incidents are found in images, audio, or video content.

Focus on what matters

When searching for specific keywords, it is possible you may get many matches that have nothing to do with what you really want to know. This needs to be filtered.

This is another situation where natural language processing (NLP) makes all the difference. It can "understand" the context of messages to identify harmful or irrelevant signals before they become a burden to the cybersecurity team.

Generating actionable insights

Information on security incidents, campaigns, or vulnerabilities is very time-sensitive. The sooner you know about them, the better. Due to the volume of data, it may be challenging to develop an action plan confidently.

Generative AI with large language models (LLMs) can summarize large amounts of information to address this issue.

Axur has leveraged AI to build DeepChat, a proprietary interface that provides insights on the latest threats found on the Deep & Dark Web. The insights are tailored to each brand or business, so you can start your day with the intelligence you truly need to prevent fraud and cyberattacks.

Prioritization

Regardless of how many detections you need to handle, if there are more than one, you need to know what needs your attention first. AI prioritization is more flexible and powerful than traditional algorithms, as model training allows it to consider many different factors. Thanks to the additional visibility and insights AI provides, prioritization becomes the piece that ties everything together.

If you want to see what an AI-powered Deep & Dark Web Monitoring solution can do for your business in the real world, check out the Axur Threat Intel Platform.