Turn underground intelligence into actionable security

COMMENTARY: When it comes to the dark web, there are a lot of perpetuating myths and a lack of understanding of the operational reality. Persistent misconceptions include the idea that it’s an “elite hacker marketplace” rather than a fragmented ecosystem of actors.

Media narratives often over-index on highly skilled threat actors and rare exploits. In practice, most of the activities are transactional, repetitive and commercially driven.

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The real structure tends to run in the form of forums, marketplaces, messaging and closed communities. That includes tiered access models and specialization across communities (credentials, malware, fraud, access brokerage).

There’s a lot of value in the dark web for defenders, but it’s often challenging to know where to look or what to look at. Defenders often misinterpret noise as signal. A high volume of low-quality or recycled data creates false positives. A lack of context leads to overreaction or missed prioritization. But used wisely, the dark web can offer important insight that can help organizations move from reactive to proactive defense.

Map the underground

Attackers reuse proven techniques like phishing, credential stuffing, and spoofing because they continue to work. Expanding digital attack surface across SaaS, remote work, and third-party access increases success rates more than innovation does.

However, the landscape does shift: law enforcement takes action and certain forums become honeypots – prompting users to migrate to different forums – so any defender worth their salt needs to pay close attention to what’s happening underground.

For IT teams, it’s just as important to focus on advanced and novel threats as ensuring good visibility and cyber hygiene and monitoring early indicators. Even “minor” cybercrime incidents can do major damage.

Keeping a careful eye on the dark web isn’t just a “check in occasionally” kind of thing. Think of it more as a continuous signal stream rather than isolated events. Actionable intelligence can live in everything from web forums to messaging platforms and online marketplaces.

Look at the intelligence – and how it gets there

There’s no shortage of valuable information available on the dark web. At the most basic level, we can search it to see if our organization’s credentials are being leaked or find stealer logs.

We can also glean other types of highly-useful information from the dark web. These include domain and brand mentions, whether in the form of discussions involving targeted brands, or sales linked to customer infrastructure, or even phishing kits impersonating customers. That’s on top of all the card and financial data, fake documents and identity artifacts out there.

It’s also possible to observe supplier-related data exposure. For instance, if a supplier has been impacted by ransomware, organizations can track the incident and determine what data was compromised. If any of that exposed data pertains to their organization, they can take action promptly.

Data leaked by ransom groups often gets shared across cybercriminal forums. In some cases, threat actors download the full leak, parse the contents and repackage portions of the data to make it appear as though it’s a new breach involving a different organization.

Some of the valuable information found on the dark web winds up there via insider threats, though that’s not the most common source. Unsatisfied employees or former employees may share or sell sensitive data, leading to potential reputational and operational damage.

It’s fairly easy to gain access to these platforms, which lowers the barrier to entry for bad actors. The more information gets circulated on platforms, the more eyes it reaches and the higher the chance that someone who really knows what they are doing gets their hands on it. Attackers can use these details to improve social engineering attacks and target victims.

Use this information effectively

When it comes to something like credential leaks, companies benefit from early detection, which lets them reset credentials before attackers can exploit them. This, in turn, helps proactively guard against account compromise, lateral movement, and possibly ransomware deployment.

Organizations must move beyond raw data collection. Raw data dumps don’t equate to intelligence: they require enrichment and validation. They need context like asset ownership, recency and scope.

Sorting out the meaningful information – the signal – from the noise requires an evaluation that looks at the following:

Cybersecurity teams can use evidence found on the dark web in a number of ways, including for identity protection. Teams can follow-up detection of exposed employee credentials with required password resets, multi-factor authentication (MFA) enforcement, and other responses. We can correlate it with identity access management (IAM) systems/logs to detect suspicious access attempts and used for threat detection enrichment.

It’s also useful for brand abuse mitigation and reducing phishing attacks. Identifying spoofed domains and phishing kits can help us prepare employees, block domains and know what to watch for. We can take preemptive action to take down or block campaigns before they scale.

Ultimately, finding this information on the dark web gives defenders the early advantage, as credentials/infrastructure often appear underground before they’re actively exploited. That means organizations can disrupt campaigns before they begin.

Turn bad actor loot into the defender’s best weapon

Because cybercrime and cybersecurity operate like a cat-and-mouse game, gaining visibility into additional platforms beyond traditional, non-CTI (cyber threat intelligence) cybersecurity methods can help organizations better understand the types of attacks occurring, which sectors and geos are being targeted, and more. Defenders can shift from reactive defense to a proactive posture by making underground intelligence strategic. They can treat underground data as an early warning layer in the security stack.

However, it’s important to avoid common pitfalls such as overcollection without prioritization or context, failing to operationalize intelligence into concrete actions, and relying on point-in-time checks rather than continuous monitoring.

The dark web has become an extension of the modern threat landscape, it’s no longer an outlier. Organizations that can effectively translate underground signals into action gain the defensive advantage.

Ivan Khamenka, threat analyst, Netcraft 

SC Media Perspectives columns are written by a trusted community of SC Media cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics. Content strives to be of the highest quality, objective and non-commercial.