Intro
Dark web intelligence in times of uncertainty
The pandemic forced a lot of organizations to rethink their cybersecurity posture. When COVID-19 hit, organizations suddenly found themselves operating in a distributed manner. Because they didn’t have the right security infrastructure and methodologies in place, dangers from the exposure to cyber threats sharply increased.
In 2020, we saw an increase in company data theft with credentials later to be offered for sale on the dark web. Cybercriminals compromised remote desktop protocols (RDPs) more often than ever before.
Also in 2020, cybercriminals shifted their attention to organizations’ endpoints – IoT, remote/connected devices – with the average cost of a data breach in the US now close to $8.64 million.
These are some of the signs that dark forces are taking over, and something has to be changed in the way we protect ourselves.
What does a company need to securely embrace digital transformation?
In 2020, increasing reliance on eCommerce and the shift to working from home made digital transformation a must for most companies. In fact, a recent Twilio study showed the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted businesses to accelerate their shift to digital by almost 6 years.
Given the technicality of this process, organizations found themselves in dire need of robust cybersecurity technology and expertise.
Harvesting and analyzing intelligence about the threat landscape is the only option for any organization that wants to avoid ransomware attacks and data breaches.
Gaining covert access to the deep and dark web as well as instant messaging apps and paste sites is the key to such threat intelligence. By harvesting real-time insights from the underground world, organizations will become more proactive rather than reactive. However, this task is not for humans, but for automated solutions that can easily scale.
Automation is critical
Automated threat intelligence solutions augment human personnel by doing the heavy lifting: analyzing more sources, harvesting more assets, searching deeper for threat points, and finding them at a speed that is humanly impossible.
One way automated tools can help prevent threats is finding essential intel on threat actors in the dark web. Let’s consider the following tactic that cybercriminals often employ. To confuse your security tools, they inundate them with a large number of fake alerts, hiding the “real” intrusion deep inside. Your security analysts become overwhelmed with the barrage of alerts, whereas an automated cybersecurity solution will have the necessary capability to sift through the false detections and the visibility to quickly identify threats.
On the other hand, the number of threat points discovered on a daily basis by such a solution is massive. It is critical for organizations to use an automated tool that will collect all that threat intelligence, assess it, and then prioritize the threats based on the risk they pose.
Cybersixgill
Illuminating the Dark Web
That is what Cybersixgill’s Investigation Portal does. By combining security automation with a large collection of deep and dark web sources as well as instant messaging apps and paste sites, Cybersixgill collects up to 11.5x more intel through automation. And thanks to the AI and machine learning capabilities, it can analyze it all and provide threat intelligence teams with real-time, actionable insights.
As the world’s third largest economy, the deep and dark web is full of valuable cybersecurity information. The hardest part is finding the right pieces of information that relate to your organization while not exposing yourself and putting your company at risk in the process.
With less than half of vendors providing truly proactive cybersecurity solutions, Cybersixgill is really a guiding light in this dark place for anyone who’s looking to protect themselves against cybercrime.
Covert investigations
When your analysts do not expose information while investigating, your battle is half won.
The Investigative Portal is completely covert. Your teams and your assets are fully anonymous, allowing
security teams to perform deep-dive investigations in the dark web while keeping you and your organization’s identity safe.
More sources, more data.
Cybersixgill is powered by the broadest and deepest, automated collection available on the market. This includes instant messaging apps such as QQ, Telegram, and Discord as well as closed hacker forums underground markets, communities, and websites.
The Investigative Portal also offers a large historical archive that can be easily searched. This huge number of data points enables users to detect indicators of compromise (IOCs) before traditional, telemetry-based intelligence solutions do. Thanks to the unique, automated data collection, Cybersixgill is indeed the next generation of threat intelligence.
Smart analytics for higher ROI and faster response
Cybersixgill’s Investigative Portal is a powerful solution to analyze, prioritize, provide contextual metadata, and convert the intel into actionable insights.
By employing the latest tech from the AI, machine learning, NLP and big data worlds, Cybersixgill takes a quantum leap in the evolution of cyber threat intelligence. .
Its analytical capabilities allow security teams to perform smart analysis of trends and events in the underground. It can identify whether the actor is a human or a bot, a novice or a seasoned hacker, what tools they use, their IPs, domains, TTPs, who their targets are, their social circle (friends, connections), their motives, contact information, and more.
These smart analytics features increase an organization’s ROI, as they enable a proactive response to threats in order to stop an attack, or prevent it from ever taking place.
Faster than fraud
Darkfeed
Darkfeed, based on Cybersixgill’s unmatched automated data collection, is feed of context-enriched indicators of compromise (IOCs),
including malicious hashes, URLs, domains, and IP addresses – are extracted and delivered in real-time. The stream brings IOCs before they are used in an attack and widely detected, enabling users to take action to prevent emerging threats – before attacks are deployed or leaked credentials are sold.
Darkfeed is also the most comprehensive IOC enrichment solution available on the market. It doesn’t simply show IOCs from SIEM, SOAR, TIP or VM platforms but provides context and explanations of what the IOC means. By enriching customers’ IOCs, security teams can gain contextual and actionable insights that otherwise would have been missed.
Delivering agility to threat intelligence
Cybersixgill pioneers the Continuous Investigation/Continuous Protection™ (CI/CP) approach to security. By implementing a modern methodology which is continuous, fast, iterative and smart, security teams can effectively manage the huge amount of data points they have to digest. The cornerstone of the CI/CP framework lies in quickly and intuitively connecting the dots between a singular tactical incident and the broader strategic landscape. CI/CP employs automation tools that empower security teams to collect, analyze, research, and respond after each intel development as seamlessly as possible while focusing on maximum security readiness at any given time.
Conclusion
Given the talent deficit that the security industry is facing right now, and in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, dark web monitoring for threat intelligence is the key to solid organizational cyber defense. Further, automation plays a critical role, allowing intelligence analysts to work more efficiently by prioritizing and proactively responding to cyberthreats.
Cybersixgill threat intelligence arms organizations with knowledge of its enemies, adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures, upcoming threats, and much more to help security teams protect their company’s most critical assets. It also enables CISOsto construct a better picture of a threat landscape and effectively communicate the state of their organizations cyber posture to key stakeholders and board members.
