Dark Web Monitoring: Protecting Your Organization from Hidden Threats
Cybersecurity best practice demands that organizations retain a tight awareness of threats they face. One vital component to this is keeping a pulse on the actions of different threat groups: the dark web is one space where threat actors congregate, share stolen data, and announce recent attacks.
As a result, dark web monitoring has become a staple of threat intelligence, allowing victims and their industry peers to quickly respond to unfolding attacks.
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What Is Dark Web Monitoring?
Dark and deep web monitoring is the process of actively scanning hidden online spaces for specific types of information that may indicate a security risk or data breach. This includes:
- Marketplaces
- Forums
- Other sites where cybercriminals often trade stolen data, credentials, intellectual property, malware, and other illicit content
Organizations and security teams use dark web monitoring as a part of their Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) to determine whether sensitive data such as login credentials, financial records, or internal documents have been exposed. By identifying these threats early, you can take proactive measures to mitigate the potential damage involved, and launch the incident response procedures.
Monitoring often conducts a hybrid approach, deploying both:
- Manual threat analysis
- Automated tools and services
Since dark web content is not indexed by traditional search engines and often changes, effective monitoring requires specialized tools and a cultural understanding of attack groups.
How Does Dark Web Monitoring Work?
Because connections to the Tor network are encrypted, traditional methods like DNS and traffic signatures can’t be used to identify who operates and owns individual sites. Instead, a new suite of dark web monitoring capabilities has been established and developed by OSINT investigators.
Monitoring of Known Onion Sites
Kept safe by the anonymity of Tor architecture, many attackers are happy to make their own onion sites known. A lot of attack groups are driven by their reputation – for Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) providers, their reputation directly corresponds with how many affiliates choose their malware.
The result is a large number of attackers publishing their own attacks, either on:
- Formal web pages
- On dark web forums
Since attacks are highly reported on by the press – and bad for a company’s reputation – an attacker threatening to publish a victim’s name can increase the pressure to pay a ransom.
For instance, ransomware group Akira maintains an up-to-date attack list: its retro darknet site is inspired by a monochrome command-line interface typical of 1980s-era computers, featuring:
- A “news” section, where recent victims are publicly named as part of the group’s extortion tactics
- A “leaks” section, where stolen data is released if the targeted organizations refuse to comply with ransom demands.
In late 2024, Akira published 35 new victims to their site in one day.
The majority of them were based in the business services sector and based in the US. By keeping an eye on attack pages such as Akira’s, it’s possible for researchers to conduct dark web intelligence collection, and monitor the state of various ongoing attacks.
It also allows organizations to adjust their own security settings, in the case of a supplier or partner getting attacked.
Discovery of Onion Sites
While some attack groups keep a tightly-maintained page, others choose to host leaked or for-sale data on random Tor sites, keeping their attacks out of the public eye. Dark web monitoring can help identify these sites with custom-built Tor crawlers.
Similar to how clear web crawlers discover and index pages, dark web crawlers are able to find and list onion sites for further analysis.
Starting with a set of seed onion URLs, the crawler begins to find links on each page, systematically following and listing them. Some dark web monitoring tools also apply a ML-driven classifier, to then determine what each page is about.
If the crawler is set to focus on forums or marketplaces, it can start to prioritize URLs and pages that match learned patterns or keywords associated with such content.
This systematic discovery allows analysts to:
- List sites
- Collect website content
- Analyze the metadata and marketplace/forum posts that then provide a basis for further analysis
While there are a plethora of open source Tor crawlers, it’s worth considering the heavy resource overhead: Tor routes traffic through multiple relays (usually three hops for normal traffic, and up to six hops when accessing onion services, since circuits are established on both client and server sides).
Each relay adds processing and network delay, increasing overall latency compared to direct internet connections. Plus, each relay decrypts and re-encrypts its own data, adding computational overhead that contributes to latency.
Infiltration of Semi-Private Communities
While web crawlers are a largely automated tool, a more manually-intensive – but highly illuminating – approach is attack group infiltration. Attackers don’t just publish complete attacks; there are entire forums and communities focused on discussing and planning ongoing ones.
Keeping an eye on these is absolutely key.
Some forums – such as RAMP – are invite-only. As one of the most notorious forums, it focuses on the trade and deployment of RaaS exploits and zero-day vulnerabilities. Another more widely-used forum is BreachForums: primarily in English, this features general discussion and posts around recent attacks.
It’s here that English-speaking attack groups seek to gain praise and reputation from their peers.
Dark web monitoring drastically helps organizations by infiltrating – or otherwise gaining intelligence from – closed or semi-private communities. This grants access to high-value data sources, such as leaked numbers and names, that are inaccessible to more passive techniques.
Favicon Unmasking
Since Onion sites are difficult to link back to their operators, or even their locations, threat intelligence benefits immensely from linking a Tor site to associated clearnet websites. There are two small web page components that make this easier:
- JavaScript hashes
- Favicons
Favicons, the small icons displayed in browser tabs, are often overlooked, yet they can act as unique digital fingerprints for websites. Typically stored in a location, these icons are sometimes reused across multiple domains. In the context of Tor hidden services, a cryptographic hash (commonly MD5) can be generated from a dark web site’s favicon.
This hash is then compared against entries in public favicon datasets such as Shodan, Censys, or FaviconDB. If a matching hash is found on a clearnet domain, it may suggest a connection between the two sites, potentially revealing shared infrastructure, common ownership, or reused assets.
By linking an onion site to a surface website, shared infrastructure, or common Bitcoin addresses can lead investigators to attribute the dark web service to a known entity or organization.
Benefits of Dark Web Monitoring
Since dark web monitoring can represent a considerable time and resource investment, it’s worth establishing its benefits.
Early Breach Detection
One of the key functions of dark web monitoring is to detect data breaches at the earliest possible stage.
When sensitive data is stolen, it often surfaces on dark web forums or marketplaces long before the affected organizations or individuals are notified through official channels. By monitoring these platforms, it becomes possible to identify exposed information, such as:
- Credit card numbers
- Social security details
- Confidential business data
Early discovery enables faster containment measures, helping to prevent further exploitation and reduce the overall impact.
Preventing Identity Fraud
Identity theft remains a major threat, with stolen personal information frequently used to conduct financial fraud, open unauthorized accounts, or impersonate individuals. Monitoring tools help uncover instances where personal data has been compromised, providing a chance to act before significant damage occurs.
Prompt measures like alerting banks, changing login credentials, or freezing credit can drastically reduce the potential for misuse.
Protecting Brand Reputation
For businesses, a publicized data breach can lead to loss of customer trust and long-term brand damage. Implementing dark web surveillance signals a commitment to securing customer information.
Responding quickly to breaches not only minimizes harm but also demonstrates a proactive approach to cybersecurity – strengthening consumer confidence and loyalty.
Meeting Compliance Requirements
Industries regulated by data protection laws, such as GDPR, or HIPAA, are required to take reasonable precautions against data leaks. Dark web monitoring supports compliance by:
- Identifying breaches early
- Enabling timely reporting and remediation in line with legal obligations
Securing Intellectual Property
Intellectual property, including proprietary code, designs, and trade secrets, is a critical asset for many organizations and individuals.
If this information appears on the dark web, it can erode competitive advantage and cause substantial financial loss. Monitoring solutions can help detect IP leaks promptly, allowing for swift containment and legal response.
Reducing Financial Exposure
The financial fallout from unauthorized data exposure can be severe.
By offering real-time alerts when data is detected on the dark web, monitoring services provide an opportunity to take swift defensive action, like disabling compromised accounts or notifying financial institutions, before attackers can capitalize on the stolen information.
Strengthening Security Posture
Dark web monitoring complements existing cybersecurity measures, such as:
It provides external visibility into emerging threats and potential data exposures, helping organizations adapt their security frameworks and incident response plans accordingly.
Deep Web vs. Dark Web: What's the Difference?
Here are the differences between deep web and dark web:
Deep Web
The deep web is any section of the internet that is not indexed by the public web’s crawlers or search engines. This includes an organization’s own intranet; an email provider’s servers – anything hidden behind a username and password.
Dark Web
The dark web, however, is a separate section of the web entirely; its underlying architecture is vastly different to that of the clearweb, and it’s accessible only to particular browser users.
The Tor Browser
The Tor browser is the most popular way to access the dark web.
Its webpages – or onion sites – are accessible by individual URLs, and can’t be found through typical search engines. As a result, users often need to find onion links on the open web, or have them sent directly from another user who already knows it.
This is because the Tor network doesn’t rely on a central DNS server (which couples a website’s ID with the easy-to-remember domain name).
Instead, it routes data through a large network of volunteer-operated nodes.
- Each data packet is wrapped in multiple layers of encryption, similar to the layers of an onion.
- As the packet travels through the network, each node removes one encryption layer, revealing only the next destination.
- No single node knows the full path or the contents of the communication.
The final node decrypts the innermost layer, delivering the original data to the intended recipient. While this anonymity can allow those in regime-restricted countries to access information and online communities, it also makes it incredibly appealing to criminals.
What’s Next for the Dark Web Monitoring Space?
Attackers are starting to leverage OSINT for themselves – a growing number of dark web users are now relying on automated site shutdown detection.
For instance, FBI Watchdog is an open source tool that allows forum and site contributors to detect when their favorite onion site is taken down or controlled by law enforcement.
On the cybersecurity side, crawlers and dark web monitoring platforms are bolstered through the adoption of big data architecture. Monitoring efforts have typically struggled with the transient nature of onion sites: in research, large quantities of discovered onion sites are already offline by the time they are published in related work.
This is made more difficult by the prevalence of duplicate websites, which results in dataset bias and skewing.
Modern tools deploy a real-time ingestion layer, driven by a pool of spiders that continuously crawl multiple sources at once. Site data can then be normalized and analyzed by AI models that classify a site’s language, role, and primary topic matters at far greater scale than ever before.
Look Over the Shoulder of Cyberattackers with Check Point Dark Web Monitoring
Check Point offers in-depth risk assessment services, which determine whether your organization has been attacked or is at risk. No matter what services you rely on day-to-day, Check Point can integrate and pull data from all internal and external sources.
Request a checkup today to establish what defenses you need to fortify.
To gain full dark web visibility at all times, Check Point’s dark web monitoring solution provides organizations with deep visibility into cybercriminal activity, enabling them to better understand and respond to emerging threats.
It supports detailed profiling of specific threat actors or groups, offering insights into their:
- Geographic origins
- Targeted industries or countries
- Preferred tools
- Typical modes of operation
The platform allows for controlled engagement with threat actors through private messaging, granting access to exclusive forums and underground communities. It grants stolen credential detection and threat actor engagement within a single platform, drastically enhancing your dark web threat intelligence.
