Is your company data on the dark web? Here’s what to look for and what do if your data now lives on the dark web.
Sıla Özeren / Picus Security If you’re looking for broader threats against your organization, pay close attention to what initial access brokers (IABs) are offering for sale on the dark web. “We regularly monitor IAB sales offerings to see if there’s any alignment between what’s being posted and our clients’ risk profiles,” says Nightwing’s Carroll. “Our analysts track posts from known IABs offering things like VPN/RDP access, admin credentials, or vulnerabilities in specific companies’ infrastructure.”Winday.co’s Adamenko adds practical advice: “Monitor marketplaces and forums that sell access to companies. Set up monitoring for mentions of your domain, IP addresses, or common usernames in sections like ‘RDP access,’ ‘VPN for sale,’ etc. Brokers often explicitly state which companies they have initial access to.”The scope of effective dark web monitoring should go beyond your company alone. Third-party risk is a major, and growing, concern, says Stephen Boyce, founder of The Cyber Doctor. “Many dark web actors target smaller suppliers, managed service providers, SaaS vendors, or even law firms with access to your systems or data,” he says. He advises monitoring forums and marketplaces not just for your own company’s name, but for “mentions of your key vendors and technology stack, especially anything with privileged access, like SSO providers, CRM systems, or cloud infrastructure.”If someone is offering access to one of your partners,” Boyce warns, “that may be a precursor to an attack on you via lateral movement. Proactively identifying this threat allows you to contact the vendor, assess your exposure, and isolate critical systems before an attacker gets in through the side door.”
Turning dark web intelligence into action: Gathering intelligence from the dark web is useful only if you know what to do with it. The most effective security programs don’t treat dark web monitoring as a siloed activity; they bake it directly into their detection and response workflows.”Companies must integrate [what they find on the dark web] into their internal monitoring,” said Ariel Parnes, COO of incident response firm Mitiga. That means “automatically cross-referencing indicators against authentication logs, identity changes, and anomalous behavior across platforms such as AWS, Azure, Okta, and M365, to name a few.” When something suspicious surfaces, like a stolen session token or exposed admin credential, Parnes stresses the need for rapid action: “They must trigger immediate investigation workflows, revoking access, re-enrolling MFA, or isolating affected services.”ISG’s Wood also urges organizations to link external intelligence to their internal processes. “Develop an incident response playbook,” he says, with plans laid out so you can “be ready to act immediately if your data appears for sale or extortion on the dark web.”That readiness also includes knowing what signs to look for. We’ve already noted that IABs are often shopping around VPN and RDP access to target companies; if you know your organization is being targeted by IABs, you should be on the lookout for exactly these kinds of attacks.”When we see patterns like unusual remote access activity increase, spikes in VPN or RDP usage, or credentials being reused across systems, these are often not random anomalies,” Wood says. “These patterns are a signature of cybercriminal ‘supply chain’ behavior, not just individual hackers.”By mapping external signals, dark web listings, threat actor chatter, credential leaks, to real-time telemetry from your environment, security teams can detect attacks not just when they happen, but as they’re being planned. In the end, dark web monitoring isn’t just about watching in the shadows. It helps you shine a light within your own perimeter, and spot things that don’t belong.
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