Dark Web Surveillance
The dark web can be a nexus of illicit activity. Forums host a wide range of criminal roles, from malware developers, money launderers, and vulnerability retailers, all of which make up an assembled supply chain of cyberattacks. 2025 has seen a rise in this, since AI-powered tools like WormGPT have increased the breadth of attack tools for sale on the dark web.
Understanding the minute-by-minute activity of attackers is a key component of cybersecurity, making dark web intelligence now vitally important.
Undertand the Dark Web
The dark web is a portion of the internet that exists within the deep web – content not indexed by traditional search engines – but with a key distinction: it’s intentionally hidden and designed for anonymity.
While the deep web includes everyday private content like email inboxes, banking portals, and academic records, the dark web requires specialized software to access. What sets the dark web apart is the routing architecture that supports it.
Rather than being accessed through everyday browsers like Google or Firefox, it operates through a decentralized network. When a user connects, their data is encrypted in multiple layers and passed through three separate nodes.
The entry node knows the user’s identity but not the destination, the middle node simply relays the traffic, and the exit node decrypts and sends the data to its destination.
This way, data can be sent online without any awareness of who the user is.
This anonymous architecture makes the dark web a popular place for illicit activity, including:
- Black-market commerce
- Data trading
- Forums for cybercriminal collaboration
It’s not all bad – this anonymity does grant activists, journalists, and whistleblowers privacy from oppressive regimes or surveillance-heavy environments.
What Content is on the Dark Web?
On the dark web, forums can serve as hubs for the cybercriminal underground, enabling threat actors to connect and transact with peers and colleagues. These forums are a cross between illegal marketplaces and professional networking sites, where each participant plays their role in the cybercrime supply chain.
At the core are malware developers, who design and sell malicious software ranging from basic keyloggers to advanced ransomware kits.
Their creations are often marketed in these forums with detailed descriptions, pricing tiers, and even customer support. Some platforms are hubs for ransomware kits, such as:
- DarkSide
- Hive
On them, affiliates can subscribe, customize the ransomware payloads, and pay the fee for the tools they’ve leveraged in successful attacks.
Initial Access Brokers (IABs) operate as middlemen, selling entry points into compromised networks – typically via stolen credentials or exploited vulnerabilities. Their listings often specify company size, industry, and geographic location, helping buyers target victims efficiently.
How Does Dark Web Surveillance Work?
The dark web hosts a wide array of compromised and malicious data types that pose serious risks to organizations and individuals. Common findings include information from third-party data breaches, where stolen credentials and sensitive files are traded or sold.
Large data dumps are also commonly found in underground forums and encrypted chat rooms, while peer-to-peer (P2P) networks can also be sources of leaked attack intel. In some cases, sensitive data appears through accidental leaks, such as misconfigured cloud storage or exposed databases.
All of this is vital for proactive threat detection.
Beyond raw data, the dark web can also hold instances of brand misuse, impersonation of executives or company accounts, and domain spoofing – where fraudulent websites mimic legitimate ones.
Dark web monitoring is the process of tracking hidden online spaces for potential threats, such as:
- Stolen data
- Planned cyberattacks
It begins when an attacker posts in a forum offering stolen datasets for sale. To detect this, specialized crawlers and scrapers are deployed to navigate obscure platforms like:
- Tor (.onion sites)
- I2P networks
- Telegram groups
- IRC channels
- Darknet marketplaces
These tools operate behind proxies or VPNs in order to bypass anti-crawling measures like CAPTCHAs.
Once the forum and darknet data are collected, it’s analyzed through several filters, a natural language processing (NLP) algorithm can identify malicious intent surrounding a search, while more basic pattern matching can detect specific data breach risks.
Together, they extract insights and filter out irrelevant content.
When the system identifies a match, such as leaked credentials or discussions of a targeted attack, it triggers a real-time alert, sent through dashboards, emails, or system integrations like APIs. These alerts enable security teams to respond immediately by:
- Resetting compromised passwords
- Revoking access
- Tightening security controls
- Informing affected users or compliance departments.
Dark web monitoring aims to detect when any of this information relating to your company is shared online – making it a key component of cyber threat intelligence and data breach prevention.
How Check Point Infiltrates Dark Web Platforms
Check Point’s Cyberint service turns dark web conversations into real-time threat intelligence.
It uses automated crawlers and human intelligence to scan a wide range of deep and dark web sources:
- Underground forums
- Encrypted chat platforms
- Paste sites
- Black markets
This allows it to uncover leaked credentials, stolen intellectual property, or planned attacks targeting specific organizations. This is then transformed into alerts when exposed data or vulnerabilities are identified.
Explore what risks are facing your organization with Check Point’s Cybersecurity Risk Assessment.
This process sees Check Point analysts assess your network with a multitude of cybersecurity tools; this allows them to examine all associated endpoints, and build a comprehensive security report of the malware, applications, and intrusion attempts that threaten your organization’s well-being.
