Prevent your organization’s data from being sold to the highest bidder by using dark web threat intelligence. With Primary Account Number (PAN), Bank Identification Number (BIN), or credit card information selling for as little as $5 per record, savvy cybercriminals can obtain and profit from company information in short order.
In fact, one dark web kingpin retired in February of 2021 after making an estimated $1 billion off the sale of stolen credit card and identity information over the course of seven years. It’s a lucrative business for cybercriminals, but what’s the cost to businesses?
Exploitation of business information isn’t limited to banking information either. From intellectual property (IP) to admin account details for your network, any valuable piece of company data can be monetized. To prevent your organization from becoming just another statistic, know the warning signs of a dark web data breach and run regular threat assessments.
The Cost of Failing to Prevent Dark Web Exposure
According to the IBM and Ponemon Institute 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report, one data breach costs a company an average of $3.86 million and takes about 280 days to find and contain.
What’s more, the Harvard Business Review found that “betrayals of trust have major financial consequences.” In terms of tangible value, the median loss of companies that experienced a significant breach of trust was 30%—nearly a third the value of the entire organization. Building and protecting trust is pivotal to not only maintaining but also increasing value within your organization.
Breached intellectual property, banking information, and personally identifiable information (PII) of employees, contractors, and customers all cost a great deal in terms of not only finances, but also trust. Preventative measures against dark web exposures, therefore, can save your organization significant time, frustration, and back-end mitigation costs.
How Information Reaches the Dark Web
The gateway to an organization’s information ending up on the dark web can be an angry employee seeking retaliation, hacktivism, or simply a successful malware attack. Once information is leaked, mitigation becomes more challenging. For this reason, organizations should routinely scan IT networks for vulnerabilities as well as monitor the dark web for organizational data leaks.
What Dark Web Threat Intelligence Covers
Dark web monitoring for a business is more complex than, say, watching over your personal credit and identity information. Tuning alerts and properly configuring settings — as well as having a team ready to address urgent alerts 24/7 — is essential to preventing unwanted threat actors from infiltrating systems. Assessments should not only check for hundreds of known vulnerabilities, but also be refreshed to address emerging threats.
Want to Know if Your Company’s Data Is on the Dark Web?
Many organizations are surprised to learn that some of their data is already making its rounds on the dark web. Get ahead of data breaches by catching threat actors before they can get away with more of your organization’s sensitive data. At Convergent, we offer complete technology assessment services that include dark web scanning. In just 5 minutes, you can have an easy-to-consume dark web vulnerabilities report in hand that includes a list of breached:
- Personally identifiable information (PII)
- Bank accounts and credit cards
- Usernames and passwords
- VIP / IT admin accounts
- Intellectual property (IP)
This isn’t where the service ends. In addition to showing where vulnerabilities lie, we’ll create a mitigation plan to close existing security gaps within your IT network and provide ongoing monitoring to prevent future breaches from gaining a foothold. Getting started is easy.