Dark Web 101
The “Dark Web” is a part of the World Wide Web that requires special software to access. Once inside, web sites and other services can be accessed.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Dark Web is a hidden universe contained within the “Deep Web”- a sub-layer of the Internet that is hidden from conventional search engines. Search engines like Google, BING and Yahoo only search .04% of the indexed or “surface” Internet. The other 99.96% of the Web consists of databases, private academic and government networks, and the Dark Web. The Dark Web is estimated at 550 times larger than the surface Web and growing. Because you can operate anonymously, the Dark Web holds a wealth of stolen data and illegal activity.
NightCrawler's service is designed to help both public and private sector organizations detect and mitigate cyber threats that leverage stolen email addresses and passwords. NightCrawler Dark Web Monitoring leverages a combination of human and artificial intelligence that scours botnets, criminal chat rooms, blogs, Websites and bulletin boards, Peer to Peer networks, forums, private networks, and other black-market sites 24/7, 365 days a year to identify stolen credentials and other personally identifiable information (PII).
NightCrawler Dark Web Monitoring focuses on cyber threats that are specific to our clients’ environments. We monitor the Dark Web and the criminal hacker underground for exposure of our clients’ credentials to malicious individuals. We accomplish this by looking specifically for our clients’ top-level email domains. When a credential is identified, we harvest it. While we harvest data from typical hacker sites like Pastebin, a lot of our data originates from sites that require credibility or a membership within the hacker community to enter. To that end, we monitor over 500 distinct Internet relay chatroom (IRC) channels, 600,000 private Websites, 600 twitter feeds, and execute 10,000 refined queries daily.
While we can’t say definitively that the data we’ve discovered has already been used to exploit your organization, the fact that we are able to identify this data should be very concerning. Organizations should consult their internal or external IT and/or security teams to determine if they have suffered a cyber incident or data breach.
While employees may have moved on from your organization, their company issued credentials can still be active and valid within the 3rd party systems they used while employed. In many cases, the 3rd party systems or databases that have been compromised have been in existence for 10+ years holding millions of “zombie” accounts that can be used to exploit an organization. Discovery of credentials from legacy employees should be a good reminder to confirm you’ve shut down any active internal and 3rd party accounts that could be used for exploit.
It delivers the same advanced credential monitoring capabilities used by Fortune 500 companies. It connects to multiple Dark Web servers including Tor, 12P and Freenet, to search for compromised credentials, without requiring you to connect any of your software or hardware to these high-risk services directly. Proactive solution provides real-time awareness of compromised credentials before identify theft or data breaches occur.
Compromised credentials are used to contact further criminal activity, such as data breaches of sensitive corporate information, as well as identity theft of individual employees. Users often have the same password for multiple services, such as network logon, social media, online stores and other services, exponentially increasing the potential damage from a single compromised username and password.
This is why Nero Consulting created a bot we named NightCrawler.ai with the capabilities to scan & monitor the Dark Web:
- NightCrawler Identifies compromises through out your organization
- NightCrawler Monitors 24/7 365
- NightCrawler Reports 80,000 compromised emails daily
- NightCrawler Prepares by collecting information
- NightCrawler Predicts to be ahead not just ready
- NightCrawler Prevents with proactive monitoring