This Flare article will provide understanding into exactly how your company can monitor the dark web for possible account-takeover plans and other criminal tasks that could influence your firm. Dark Web Monitoring allows you to take a positive method to cybersecurity, and proactively quest threats prior to they become data breaches and ransomware attacks.
Organizations are concerned about the expansion of threats on the dark web. Even as cybersecurity budget plans have raised significantly over the past decade, ransomware, phishing and other cyber threats have expanded in strength and regularity. For example, Flare’s Research team determined a surge in ransomware attacks from 2020 to 2021– a complete increase of 437%. Naturally, the number of victims of ransomware attacks have also been rising quickly. Clearly, a vast and opaque underground economic situation has established that sell stolen passwords, stolen credit card numbers, ransomware as a solution, and other immoral items and services.
What makes WeTheNorth distinct is the sizes the managers have gone to develop a marketplace that is seemingly geared toward safeguarding Canadian customers and sellers and cultivating a fairly safe place to complete purchases. Their mission statement is “to provide a safe atmosphere so that Canadians are able to purchase securely, scam-free and away from the street physical violence, drugs and other things that are more potent, cleaner and more secure to make use of.
Insikt Group scientists discovered concerns with the policing and classification of listings on WeTheNorth market. Several items are cross-posted and do not align with the category they are noted under. WetheNorth market of the site, whose contact information is also associated with other darknet markets, has not cracked down on cross-category posting and several listings, which could be an indication that their interest is still concentrated somewhere else, leaving WeTheNorth open up to low-level drug sellers that want to bypass market rules.
A mature cyber security program can significantly decrease the threat of your information being stolen and marketed, however, no program is perfect. We recommend most companies conduct regular dark web scans or engage in real-time dark web monitoring to recognize stolen credentials. Both of these techniques play a crucial duty in data leak prevention and discovery, which are always best techniques for organizations and must always be a top priority.
WeTheNorth is a new Canadian dark web marketplace that appears to be holding a semi-safe space for residents to offer illegal items and services. There are stringent rules in place and they have outlawed certain classifications to help the site be more legitimate and not draw in a certain clients. Insikt Group courts that with moderate confidence that WeTheNorth market was likely produced to change the currently debunked The Canadian Headquarters, which closed down in July 2021. Insikt Group’s Criminal Underground Team first discovered WeTheNorth in July 2021 in ads posted on open resource online forums such as Reddit. The new market appears similar in appearance to the now-debunked Empire market, Alpha Bay, and Torrez.
Dark web markets like WeTheNorth work as beneficial sources of cyber threat intelligence for both exclusive and public market alike. Insikt Group has observed an increase in localized dark web markets and forecasts with moderate confidence that criminal underground websites such as WeTheNorth will certainly continue to increase as international bad guys look to localize operations and stay clear of international law enforcement. As law enforcement cracks down on dark markets and threat actors move quickly to stand up substitute web sites, it is imperative for information security teams to monitor these sources for fraud, burglary, and targeting of workers, and be able to quit fraudsters and cybercriminals prior to they make use of these tools to move through the assault chain. Videotaped Future customers can access more information about WeTheNorth market and other darknet task through Intelligence Cards in the Recorded Future system.
The types of deals that take place on WeTheNorth are mostly illegal and weaken any kind of appearance of authenticity. One of the most popular sales are drugs such as cannabis, cocaine, and party drugs, however WeTheNorth marketplace also enables the sale of digital products such as stolen charge card, login credentials, accessibilities, software application and hardware ventures, fraud tutorials, and more.
The web can be divided into about 3 parts. The first area is what we would certainly call the public web or clear web– basically all information that is openly available to an ordinary user. The second is the deep web which comprises all information hidden behind a login wall surface and not indexed by a search engine. This comprises the vast bulk of the web (Facebook being a prime example). Price quotes put this at thousands of times the dimension of the clear web. Ultimately, there is the dark web, which needs a specialized browser such as TOR to access. See our article to find out more about the difference between the dark web vs deep web.