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The benefits of having a tool like this for monitoring the dark web include efficient continuous monitoring and assessment of a multitude of sites allowing security teams to monitor more of the web to catch more threats faster. Additionally, they can access this data without ever having to hunt down and access the various dark web forums and marketplaces which is both more secure and much more time-efficient. After discussing the commercial importance of cyber threat intelligence in Chapter 2, we will begin learning how these cyber threat intelligence systems are built. The first logical step, which will be covered in this chapter, is to introduce the online hacker communities from which so much cyber threat intelligence derives.
- Discussions of underground forums can evoke imagery of a city’s shadowy back alleys, populated by faceless figures.
- The forum, which has over 500 posts per day and 700 sub-dreads, is known to feature in-depth guides to manufacturing illegal drugs, sell stolen data, and announce major marketplace closures.
- Though the account creation process is simple and accessible to all, Dread features several advanced security measures which render it quite different from most other discussion forums.
- The money to be exchanged is parked there until the goods or services are confirmed as being legitimate.
And this is not surprising because this is the main dark web source of cyberbullying, threats of violence, prohibited information, and much more. The Dread forum is known as a dark web alternative to the popular Reddit. Here you can communicate without censorship on any topic without fear of surveillance and data leakage. RaidForums is one of the well-known forums, which is famous for a storehouse of leaked information. Here you can see an advertisement for the sale of a data leak with an exclusive purchase of it on the market.
Threat Advisories
In this post, we’ll cover what you need to know about dark web forums and how to integrate dark web forum monitoring into your external cybersecurity strategy. Shortly after the known and popular Raidforums was seized, one of its main leading and noticeable members, pompompurin, launched breached.co which was announced to be the official replacement to Raidforums. Raidforums’ users were naturally drawn to this site, as it provided the same information and its design resembles Raidforums. Its “Databases” section maintains over 80 unique datasets containing over 1 billion records, with a total sum of over 20K users and more than 85K posts to date. The forum also consists of other sections such as Cracking, Marketplace, Tutorials and Scripts.
4Chan actually offers greater anonymity than even other dark web platforms. Like, you just communicate without any identity because there’s nothing like registration. By examining the number of users and activity per user in forums over time, this exercise results in several indicators that could be used to diagnose a forum’s health. Automating the analysis of these indicators can inform threat intelligence analysts which forums are on the rise. Just open Tor browser and go to exploit.in, and it will offer to switch to the Tor version.
Dark Web Website
Specifically, we collected approximately 248,359 unique listings and 1,138,961 unique forum traces from 10 anonymous online marketplaces and 6 forums. We then identified 311 opioid keywords and jargons to recognize 28,106 listings and 13,508 forum traces related to underground opioid trading activities. Finally, we used natural language processing techniques to extract opioid trading information to characterize underground opioid commodities, suppliers, and transactions. We first conducted a whole-site crawl of anonymous online marketplaces and forums to solicit data. The dark web economy has seen major shifts in the past year as new opportunities for cybercrime created new profitability for everyone from major ransomware gangs to cybercrime-as-a-service gig workers. Demand for all kinds of skilled cybercrime work is high – experts estimate that 90% of posts on popular dark web forums are from buyers looking to contract someone for hacking services.
Figures are based on deep and dark web searches performed by Aon in March 2020. A member of this forum took credit for it, and posted links to the download of the Turkish citizen’s information. As you can see, this forum covers a dizzying amount of illegal activity. The entire forum is in Russian – and has about 5,000 active members. This is just the tip of the iceberg, too; every sub-forum is split even further into dozens of other sub-forums. To document everything here would take me at least six months and encompass a full book.
How Does The Dark Web Work
Dread was created by its main admin /u/HugBunter and is currently the go-to forum for darknet-related discussions. We can’t blame them, based on previous actions by authorities to shut down hacking forums containing similar files that claim to expose governmental information. We saw this happen this month with forums containing information regarding the German government officials, where links became mysteriously unavailable seconds after the news broke. Therefore, we think this was likely a safety precaution by the site admin in order to protect against unwanted attention.
For now, there’s no indication that the site is a law enforcement honeypot, but given Hell’s history, users might have a hard time trusting it. It’s unclear when exactly Hell came back online as the forum doesn’t log the dates when posts are made—likely for security reasons. An anonymous source tipped me off to the site’s new .onion URL on Sunday and judging from the extremely low amount of posts, it probably just relaunched last weekend. Not an actual data breach of an organization, rather a COMBO which is a compilation of some different breaches containing usernames and passwords collectively stored in a file. The most popular access types advertised for sale on forums are admin- or user-level access for Remote Desktop Protocol , virtual private network and content management systems . For companies and institutions of all kinds, matters regarding the protection of Intellectual Property and Personally Identifiable Information from cyber-breaches and data-leaks are demanding higher financial investment.
However, because these forums are easy to find, they often attract amateurs in the community. In order to locate more relevant forums for security research, the snowball sampling method can be used to crawl the darknet. To these ends, in our latest report, we analyzed five extremely popular English and Russian-language underground forums from their inception to the end of 2020. We discovered that they indeed expanded their membership exponentially.
