The internet continues to evolve making our lives easier with better connectivity and more convenience than ever. That part of the internet is only the tip of the iceberg. The Internet hides the Dark Web which is the haven for illegal cyber activities.
This blog focuses on explaining to you about the Dark Web and how it can trouble businesses. Businesses need to know how cyber criminals conduct cyber attacks through the Dark Web and how businesses can protect themselves from being a victim.
What is the Dark Web?
The internet is larger than it seems to us. The Internet can be identified in three parts:
- Surface Web: This is the part of the Internet we use in our daily lives – browsing, online shopping etc. These websites are indexed by search engines and can be accessed from them. This is the layer that is visible to the public. This roughly constitutes about 5% of the Internet.
- Deep Web: The deep web consists of websites that require a login to them. These websites are not indexed by the search engines and cannot be fully accessed from them. Deep web includes emails/chat messages, bank statements, websites that require you to pay for a subscription to access them like Netflix, etc. This constitutes about 90% of the Internet.
- Dark Web: Dark Web is the part of the Internet that is hidden. Websites in the Dark Web cannot be accessed from conventional web browsers. They can be accessed by browsers like TOR (The Onion Router). Dark Web as such is not illegal and can be used for anonymous browsing. Provided its anonymous nature, Dark Web is also used for illegal purposes like purchasing and selling of illegal drugs, pornography, weapons, stolen data etc.
How can the Dark Web pose a threat to businesses?
The greatest advantage for cyber criminals is that the Dark Web is completely anonymous. This is optimal for criminal gangs to communicate amongst themselves about sharing techniques to counter anti-virus. Bitcoin allows payments to be made on the Dark Web.
Some of the threats Dark Web presents to businesses are:
- Sale of Ransomware: Ransomware packages are sold on the Dark Web, these packages can also be customized for criminals with less/ low technical knowledge to launch an attack. This is called Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS).
- Sale of business data: If your organization gets hacked and goes through a Data Breach, there are high chances that the hackers would have sold them on the Dark Web.
- Zero-day exploits: A Zero day exploit is when hackers take advantage of any vulnerabilities in operating systems, web browsers or any applications which interact with data. This kind of attack is called Zero day because there is no time given for developers to fix the issue, since the attack is done immediately upon discovery. Hackers share the stolen information quickly on the Dark Web for large sums of money.
How to protect your business from the Dark Web?
Businesses can defend themselves from cyber attacks by having VAPT (Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing) services along with their cybersecurity plans.
VAPT services can help businesses by:
- Identifying vulnerabilities
Through VAPT, you can have cybersecurity analysts scan your organization’s security infrastructure and detect vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers. Being proactive in finding out loop holes in your security can help your business avoid data breaches.
- Dark Web Monitoring
Dark Web Monitoring is a proactive measure focused on identifying and mitigating threats from the dark web. This is a continuous process of scanning the Dark Web for your organization’s information. This helps in finding leaked sensitive information shared and sold in the Dark Web. When a threat is discovered an alert can be created to notify the organization.
- Penetrating Testing response
Penetrating Testing simulates cyberattacks including those that are from the Dark Web. Through this, organisations can have a better understanding about the effectiveness of the incident response.
- Security Awareness and Training
It is important to train your organization employees about Dark Web threats, there are cases of insider threats where employees collaborate with hackers. VAPT can help organizations improve their security standards and reduce the risk of insider threats.
Conclusion
In this blog, we have discussed various threats the Dark Web poses to businesses and how substantial they can be. Assessing threats through advanced simulations helps combat Dark Web threats. Reinfosec provides security solutions which will help you validate your security controls and see how it performs against real time attacks. These security solutions are essential and mandatory by industry standards.