The dark web online is a haven for threat actors, where criminal organizations flourish in swapping hacked and stolen information, and where illicit goods are often bought and sold with bitcoins.
It is also becoming an increasing focus for security forces worldwide who are gravitating to the dark side of the web to monitor such illegal activities.
But the cyber-criminal or threat actor is becoming increasingly sophisticated in trying to cover up their digital footprints and conceal their activities. This calls on law enforcement agencies having to deploy dark web monitoring tools.
Dark web monitoring solely by humans alone can be a laborious and monumental task that could be weeks in planning and execution, by which time the threat has already moved on.
Instead, forensic analysts are turning to AI-driven tools that can be used to analyze big data within a relatively short time and extract and highlight the most relevant data from the open, deep and dark web.
Such tools offer critical real-time insight for investigators into the networks and co-conspirators that a threat actor may well be communicating with, or adopting certain profiles to avoid exposure.
These dark web monitoring tools can be used with the minimum of leads, to unmask detection, discover key locations of threat actors, uncover IP addresses, map out their connections, and effectively stay one step ahead of their intentions.
This analysis can underpin faster-decision making, more decisive actions to improve public safety and bring investigations to speedier conclusions while minimizing potential threats to humans and public assets.
The best tools can also track cryptocurrency money trails and even identify potential internal threats in an organization, such as a bank. These can also be used to scan the dark web to flag up mentions of an organization’s name that could reveal a potential security weakness or breach of confidentially-held information.
Dark web monitoring tools are equipped with a host of services using smart algorithms, such as Natural Language Processing (NLP). This can help lift the veil on a multitude of dark web forums and message boards that are in various languages from Arabic and English to Russian and Chinese.
A mass of solutions is now available to law enforcement that can help build a proactive stance to investigations and dark web monitoring. AI tools move an investigator from constantly playing catch up to staying ahead of the threat.
Advanced web intelligence platforms also provide a visual representation of cyber events, revealing a larger, graphically displayed picture as inter-connected dots of information that entail location data collection about specific targets.
Such dark web technology tools will quickly connect the dots in a visual graph and gives actionable insights in an automated report.
In harnessing advanced, proprietary artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, dark web monitoring suddenly becomes easier and swifter to achieve and helps meet the needs of private and government sectors with simplicity and efficiency.
Using these dark web monitoring tools suddenly puts an analyst at a key advantage particularly when there could be an active timeframe from either emerging threats or evolving criminal activity.
