The dangers of the dark web: being safe online – Open Access Government

Lead security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, Javvad Malik explores security awareness and security issues primarily with a focus on the human element.

A) If youre using the web regularly then Id say make sure your website is up to date and that your device is up to date and fully patched thats number one. Id say using something like a password manager is really good practice because that will help you choose a unique and strong password for every single website that you need an account for.

What we find is that a lot of people use the same password across many different websites. So if I somehow guess one of your passwords or break into it on one website, then the first thing Im going to do is use that password against every other website I can think of. And if youre reusing the same password, I can get into lots of your other accounts, including maybe your corporate accounts. So using a password manager to have unique passwords is good.

And the other thing is just turning off any services you dont need. So sometimes you get a new computer or a phone and you have these apps on it that you maybe dont need or dont use or thered be extensions on your browser. So just turn them off, disable them or uninstall them. If you dont need it, then dont have it there because all of these unnecessary apps could potentially be an avenue through which someone could gain access to your system.

A) I think its kind of like an aspirational tagline in that regard. What we can do, we can just reduce the risk. And thats what its all about. Its like you can have all the safety features in the world on anything. Its like saying, will an aeroplane never have a crash? No, you cant actually say that, but with all the controls and safety measures we have in place, youre really confident that when you get on a plane, its going to get you to your destination. You think youve got to be unlucky to have a crash.

Were trying to get to a point where we can reduce the risk to a point where browsing the Internet in a normal manner and logging onto websites, becomes relatively safe. We also want to reduce the likelihood of you being hacked or someone stealing your information or getting into your browsing. We want it to become the exception and not the norm.

Cybersecurity isnt just relevant to organisations and digital firms

I think ultimately the human element plays into everything that we do. Whatever happens, even if its a computer-based attack, theres someone that coded that or implemented that or architected it. So its something that will be ongoing, but I think its something that we need to focus on beyond just even corporations, its something that impacts everyone in our daily lives. All of our lives are digitised nowadays. Its like everything resides on an electronic device somewhere. We access stuff through an app. So being more aware of what you should post, who you should share stuff with, and whats relevant or not, I think that it becomes more of a societal issue. Cybersecurity isnt just relevant to organisations and digital firms.

A) Identity theft is a really hard thing to protect from because it depends on where the criminals get the information from. Say, if theyre able to hack into a government website, say they get into the DVLA, then theres nothing as individuals we can do, because we have to provide them with our information stored by them, and we trust them. And if they get breached, then that information is there. That can be used for identity theft.

But I think more on an individual level, we should just be really mindful about the amount of information we share with who and for what purposes. So a lot of websites will sometimes ask for information, and if you look at it, its not really relevant to that. So I dont give up information unless you absolutely need to. Dont be scanning or taking photographs, like your ID, or your passport, uploading that to websites just to get on a new social media platform or something like that. Look at their privacy policy sometimes, especially in Europe, were covered on GDPR, and you can see whether theyre committed to it.

And if you feel like an organisation has used your information for other reasons than why you gave them the information, say you signed up for one service, and suddenly you start getting spam from another. You can report them online, like to the ICO, the information commissioners office, and other such organisations, and they can investigate that, and where relevant, they can penalise those organisations. The final part is: that you can set up things like credit monitoring services or identity monitoring services just to see if someones taking out a loan in your name or someones taking a credit card in your name or doing something similar. So whatever you do, you can get tracked, and you can get alerted whenever any such activity happens. So these are all things you can do to try and minimise the risk of identity theft.

A) There are a couple of different types of data that are commonly traded. I suppose certain datas quite easy to get hold of. So credit card information, payment information thats really quite frequently skimmed and stolen, because you can take payment data if you can compromise, say, like a point of sale terminal or something, you can skim a lot of that information quite quickly. Thats traded normally very quickly because those cards get blocked very quickly. As soon as you see a few dodgy transactions, you can block your card. And so theyll trade, but theres a very small window and normally they go for quite cheap.

We see lots of people losing massive amounts of entire life savings

More personal information starts to go for a lot more and thats where the bigger trades happen. So if its personal information, name, address, phone number, thats one level. But then if you can add in things like national insurance numbers, social security numbers, or medical records and things like that, the value goes up and they start being packaged into individual identities as a service. And then those can be used for either multiple things like creating new passports or buying properties or taking out loans or just using them to set up fake identities further on down the line as well.

So those things become more useful because they are really hard to change. If your name and address get leaked, its really hard to change them. Whereas a credit card, thats got breached, lets just reject that and order a new one.

A) It is very common. Its not common as everyone will know someone that suffered from it, but people will often be within two degrees away from someone that suffered from either wholesale identity theft or some form of fraud or online sort of scam. So it does happen quite frequently. A lot of times it will be like a small transactional thing. We see a lot of pensioners being targeted. A criminal will ring up with only a few bits of information about that person, their name, and their address, but thats sometimes all they need to establish credibility. The scammer will lie that they are from the individuals bank and say something along the lines of We need to move your pension pot, go online and can you do this? And so we see lots of people losing massive amounts of entire life savings in some cases to some of these scams.

A) Theres no way to guarantee it isnt. But there are some monitoring services available and even some of these credit monitoring or personal identity monitoring services, they have tie-ins to some of these companies. And there are dedicated threat intel companies who will spend a lot of time on the dark web, where they have analysts who set up their fake profiles to gain access to these forums on the dark web.

Oftentimes, especially in these criminal forums, you need someone to vouch for you to say that this person is not an undercover police officer

So to access the dark web, its not as straightforward as the normal web. Oftentimes, especially in these criminal forums, you need someone to vouch for you to say that this person is not an undercover police officer. They will vouch for you. Youll have to spend some time gaining their trust and observing and then theyll give you access to that forum on the dark web and then you can start scouring some of the information thats there and not there. So there are many organisations that do that, but it is quite an intensive process and you might not catch all the information thats available there. You probably get broad strokes.So you can get a rough idea, but you cant say for certain that device details are in there or not.

A) Yeah, it can be quite dangerous, especially if youre not careful as an analyst. Some of those people can track you back to who you are and thats one thing you dont want to happen. So thats why its not advised that average people try this. So within these organisations, they normally have a safe network set up and they have their safe machines and they dont log in with their real names or anything like that. So it gives them that additional level of protection. Its also an expensive and labour-intensive process. It takes time.

A) So its really like what you can do with it and the longevity of the information. So if you have someones date of birth and national insurance number, thats not going to change forever. So that will go for more than just credit card information which will be changed in two weeks. Sometimes it also depends on the volume of data. So if theres a big dump from a large organisation thats been hacked, and theyve got two million records, then an individual record might not cost much, but the bidding on that volume of information can go up. Its very similar to eBay some items theyll list on there, and bidding will begin because so many criminals want that particular piece of information. Its not always clear what drives that demand, but certain things are needed at that time, because we saw when code first hit, and lots of governments were offering these COVID relief packages. So at that time, there was a lot of demand in the underground forums for these packages.

A) The dark web was set up with good intentions. The Tor Project believed that too many governments were spying on and oppressing people across the world. So it was a way of allowing people to freely express their views or share information. Theres that level of anonymity and privacy afforded, youll see criminals set up shop there as well. So while Tor is used to access the dark web, it isnt the entire dark web. The dark web itself is very much like the normal web from an operational perspective. The data is held on servers around the world. So its just because its not directly accessible from the main internet, as we browse it, you have to go through the Tor browser. It gives you that anonymity. So its not been completely taken over. But I think nowadays, whenever anyone thinks of the dark web or using the onion ring, then they think of something dodgy.

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The dangers of the dark web: being safe online - Open Access Government