Why we all need to worry about the dark web

As our daily online consumption continues to increase so does our curiosity about what we can actualy find on the underbelly of the internet.

The dark web often features as a plot-point in films and TV shows, usually in dramatic scenes involving drug barons, government espionage and criminal gangs. But far from being some totally separate, parallel universe, we are actually far more connected than most people realise.

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Every time a website suffers a security breach - most recently Equifax - huge databases of personal information, usernames and passwords are offered up by hackers for sale or exchange on the dark web.

Dark Web portal claiming to sell Equifax data

The harsh reality is that most of us probably already have some of our private information floating around on the dark web, our small contribution to the gloabl business generated by data theft and identity fraud.

What exactly is the dark web?

The internet is made up of three different layers: the surface web, the deep web and the dark web.

The surface web is the top layer of the internet, and includes all the web pages that show up using search engines like Google.

The deep web are web pages that don’t show up in search engines because they are hidden and only accessible via passwords and authorisation, such as password-protected parts of online banking and work intranets. These can't be accessed using search engines.

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The dark web is a network of untraceable online activity and websites that cannot be found using search engines and can only be accessed using dedicated software.

But the dark web isn't all bad or illegal, users in countries with strict censorship laws can use it to access mainstream sites and exchange information securely. However, this same anonymity has also enabled it to hide some of the most serious crimes on the internet.

Everyone in cyber security knows about the problem of stolen credentials on the dark web. 

The tendency of people to reuse passwords everywhere and all the time is compounding this problem - if someone uses their regular password to set up a throw-away account on a shopping site that then gets breached, then ALL of the private information that they store and access on sites across the web each day could easily be compromised.

The biggest challenge is that the data on the dark web is typically not found by the tools that most IT teams use to monitor the internet, such as scanners, scrapers, or web crawlers.

Instead, dedicated analysts usually need to spend time manually browsing through forums and building up trust in order to gain access to sensitive data so they can check for company credentials.

Since monitoring the dark web in this way is a very time-intensive task, it is easier for organisations to increase their dark web visibility by partnering with vendors that can pull data in from the dark web and integrate it into a company’s monitoring and threat detection capabilities. 

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But to implement real change, we also need a greater understanding of the dark web itself.

More research is required so that we can understand the ways in which the data is acquired and shared amongst criminals, and develop best practices for detecting and responding to the cyber-attacks that can result if stolen information is sold on the dark web.

Learning how to shine a light on this murky abyss can make the internet itself - and all the data shared within it - considerably safer.