Modern dark web investigations bear little resemblance to the investigations of 25 years ago. By necessity, investigators and their techniques have had to evolve with the dark web itself. The dark web is a highly secretive place run largely by threat actors and nefarious organizations who go to great links to maintain secrecy. So modern investigations need to go beyond traditional threat intelligence.
DarkOwl is a threat intelligence specialist offering a selection of OSINT tools and SOAR strategies for uncovering even the most hard to find threats. The organization offers one of the industry’s largest commercially available databases of continually aggregated darknet content to complement its advanced analytic tools.
How this organization operates exemplifies why modern dark web investigations need to go beyond traditional threat intelligence. Whether an organization using their services is a private company, a corporation, a law enforcement agency, or a federal government agency, the need to illuminate hidden criminal ecosystems is critical to maintaining security.
Every Darknet Resource Is on the Table
First-generation dark web investigations focused mainly on publicly available landing pages. Such pages represented the lowest-hanging fruit on the dark web. And 25 years ago, that was good enough. Today, such low hanging fruit has very little to offer.
Today’s threat actor relies on encrypted chat platforms and messaging apps. He frequents darknet marketplaces to sell stolen credentials or buy malware-as-a-service (MaaS). The modern threat actor frequents hacker communities, ransomware leak sites, and even professional forums.
All these sources are buried below multiple layers of landing pages. But the persistent digger will find the gold he’s after. The more deeply cybersecurity experts are willing to dig, the more they break through complex layers to find invaluable information that could stop attacks before they happen.
Security Teams Need Multiple Entry Points
The complexity of the modern dark web is such that cybersecurity teams need multiple entry points. They cannot rely exclusively on landing pages and social media channels. So organizations like DarkOwl make it a point to produce the products and solutions security experts need to get in.
They develop things like advanced search queries capable of uncovering leaked credentials and stolen information. They enable queries that can reveal threat actor communications or evidence of illicit transactions. But that’s not all. Other entry points include:
- Custom Search APIs
- Ransomware APIs
- Dynamic exposure risk scoring
- SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) platforms
To security experts serious about stopping modern threat actors, today’s dark web investigations can leave no stone unturned. Whatever it takes to find and reveal threat actors and their activities is on the table.
Teams Also Need Continuous Monitoring
Multiple entry points are only the beginning for modern dark web investigations. Security teams also need the ability to continually monitor once inside. Customizable data streams providing access to raw darknet data gather plenty of information for human analysts to look at. They can learn about:
- Emerging threats
- Fraudulent activities
- Online scams
- Ransomware operations
- Data breaches
In addition, data gleaned from continuous monitoring is enriched with archived data and advanced analytics that tie the two together. With the right tools and strategies, security teams can take all the data harvested from their dark web deep dives and turn it into effective strategies.
Dark web investigations in the 2020s go far beyond the traditional threat intelligence practices of a quarter-century ago. They need to. The dark web and its operators are not standing idly by while things grow stale. They are actively developing their secret portion of the internet in hopes of staying multiple steps ahead.