7 Best Practices for Dark Web Scanning | #deepweb

It would be great if Dark Web scans were as simple as Google searches – if you could simply plug your business’s name into a search engine, run a query and view a list of results about threats that impact your company.

Unfortunately for businesses seeking to stay a step ahead of threat actors, quite the opposite is true. It’s not just that there is no Google or search index that teams can turn to when searching for threats. It’s that if you tried to build an index of Dark Web content, you couldn’t, because the Dark Web is constantly changing. Threat actors continuously jump from one forum to another. They post content, then delete it hours later. They change their digital identities sometimes multiple times per day.

For these reasons and more, simply defining what you need to scan, let alone scanning it, is a tremendous challenge when it comes to the Dark Web.

But that doesn’t mean businesses should ignore the Dark Web. On the contrary, the Dark Web presents a wealth of information that helps organizations discover which threat actors may be targeting their IT estates and which attack techniques the actors intend to use. As Forbes notes, Dark Web scanning is critical “to gain actionable threat intelligence so that you can be forewarned about potential attacks.”

The question, then, is how to perform Dark Web scanning effectively. Although there is no simple answer, there are effective techniques that, when employed simultaneously, empower teams to identify relevant threat information lurking on the Dark Web and incorporate it into their cyberdefense strategies.

Let’s walk through those techniques and explain the role they play in Dark Web scans.

It would be great if Dark Web scans were as simple as Google searches – if you could simply plug your business’s name into a search engine, run a query and view a list of results about threats that impact your company.

Unfortunately for businesses seeking to stay a step ahead of threat actors, quite the opposite is true. It’s not just that there is no Google or search index that teams can turn to when searching for threats. It’s that if you tried to build an index of Dark Web content, you couldn’t, because the Dark Web is constantly changing. Threat actors continuously jump from one forum to another. They post content, then delete it hours later. They change their digital identities sometimes multiple times per day.

For these reasons and more, simply defining what you need to scan, let alone scanning it, is a tremendous challenge when it comes to the Dark Web.

But that doesn’t mean businesses should ignore the Dark Web. On the contrary, the Dark Web presents a wealth of information that helps organizations discover which threat actors may be targeting their IT estates and which attack techniques the actors intend to use. As Forbes notes, Dark Web scanning is critical “to gain actionable threat intelligence so that you can be forewarned about potential attacks.”

The question, then, is how to perform Dark Web scanning effectively. Although there is no simple answer, there are effective techniques that, when employed simultaneously, empower teams to identify relevant threat information lurking on the Dark Web and incorporate it into their cyberdefense strategies.

Let’s walk through those techniques and explain the role they play in Dark Web scans.