For most internet users, most of their time is spent shopping or watching videos. It is legitimate, legal and mostly harmless. But there’s another side of the internet, used for accessing much less reputable content – the dark web. We’ve spoken about what the dark web is in another blog post.
We often hear about companies suffering data breaches, and often the cyber criminals will distribute thousands (or sometimes millions) of users’ details on the dark web. It’s not nice wondering if your personal or critical business information can be found on the dark web. If there is data there, it’s almost impossible to remove it from the dark web completely, but there are still steps you can take to protect your business from the dark web.
Dark Web Monitoring
One of the services ACUTEC offers is dark web monitoring. Dark web monitoring searches the dark web for any information that shouldn’t be there – generally usernames and passwords. If data linked to one of your organisation’s is found, you will be notified, and if details of the account’s name are available, we strongly recommend changing that password.
Dark web monitoring uses technologies to search the dark web in areas information is commonly shared. We often see they appear of ID theft forums, but they could appear on any dark web webpage.
How Can Dark Web Monitoring Help Your Business?
As we’ve mentioned, once data appears on the dark web, it is almost impossible to remove it, and it could be used or sold in the future. Dark web monitoring isn’t designed for this. It is meant to let you know if your information appears on the dark web, so you can do what’s necessary to protect yourself.
Would you rather know that you have compromised data and change any passwords so that the information on the dark web is useless? Or would you rather not know, and potentially leave your sensitive accounts open to attack?
Safety Tips You Should Follow
Here are some safety tips you should follow, to minimise the damage if any of your accounts are compromised:
- Use unique passwords – make sure none of your accounts use the same password. If they’re all the same, and your email password is leaked, cyber criminals have now got access to all your accounts.
- Use sophisticated passwords – use a combination of lower and upper case letters, numbers and symbols.
These tips will make it harder to remember passwords though. Fortunately, there’s something you can do about that:
- Use a password manager – securely store your passwords, so you don’t need to remember the individual ones. You’ll just need to remember one master password – so make it a good one!
- Use MFA where possible – combine something you know (a password) with something you have. This could be by text message, email, phone call or dedicated authenticator app, such as Microsoft Authenticator.
- Make sure websites are secure – always look out for HTTPS next to a web address – this adds an extra level of security.
You can’t stop a data leak. Cyber criminals look for vulnerabilities to try and gain access to sensitive information they can use. But we can all make it harder for them to access our data.
If you’re interested in our dark web monitoring, talk to one of our consultants to see if your data is at risk.
