It’s important that not only law enforcement and government monitor Dark Web trends and activity, but also that businesses do so in order to keep up with current attack methods or discover new bots, viruses or malware to combat potential malicious activity.
Using Dark Web hacking trends knowledge combined with known enterprise security weaknesses, security administrators can test their environments to find gaps and strengthen their overall security posture.
In addition to analyzing potential threat intelligence, Dark Web monitoring can prepare organizations in the following ways:
- Monitor what data has been breached, including company domain names, email addresses, facility references and the names and information of executives. Security experts can be alerted that their company has been breached. Then, they can potentially initiate conversations with bad actors for more detailed transactional data as appropriate, based on the evidence discovered while monitoring.
- Understand where there might be weak links at the employee and enterprise level. Through social engineering tests of the latest tactics that can be investigated on the Dark Web, security professionals can ensure security on the employee level and enforce security training, providing best practices and tips. On an enterprise level, this intelligence can allow security professionals to block access to phishing domains and share them as they become known, so that unintended compromises don’t take place where system users are most susceptible.
- Share intelligence through advisories to make the entire security community smarter — and businesses more informed. As seen in the Dark Web forums, collaboration is important both between governments internationally and within the U.S. between private sector organizations and vendors as hacking groups can target anyone.
- Develop tools to detect exploits and block attacks as they emerge to advance security methods beyond antivirus and firewall protection.
Advanced knowledge of Dark Web chatter can reduce risks and allow organizations to take a strategic, proactive approach to their security. With more advanced knowledge of a potential threats, security professionals can better prepare by hardening defenses and strengthening their response playbooks to mitigate the effects of an attack.
From The Shadows Emerges Knowledge