What is a Dark Web Scan?
As we know, the Dark Web is the set of Internet sites that we cannot access without special software. All the content is not available only by searching on Google or browsing with one of the most popular browsers. It is related to online crime. It is the place where many cyber-criminals sell social network accounts, for example. We can also find all types of hacking tools. Today we're going to talk about what a Dark Web scanner is and how we can use it to protect our accounts.
Uses of the dark web
First, we tell you that there are legal uses for the services that the Tor program hides. To give you an example, Facebook itself offers a site on Tor. This site is facebookcorewwwi.onion. You can only access this site if you have access to Tor. Besides, this site allows you to browse Facebook in countries where it is blocked. The search engine, called DuckDuckGo, serves to circumvent government censorship.
However, it's not all good. Much of the use of the dark web is known to be due to criminal acts. This means that if you're going to sell financial and credit card databases, you'll want to hide your information. In this way, you will be able to carry out your criminal activities without the authorities being able to do anything. For this reason, computer criminals and ordinary criminals sell information on the dark web.
No service can scan the entire dark web
And let this be clear: no dark web scanning service can do this service in this whole vast network. When we say it is extended, it is. Similarly, nothing will be able to scan billions of addresses of sites hosted on the dark web. And we're talking about billions just by counting the sites that are accessed through Tor .onion.
It's mathematically impossible to see and verify every one of them. To see if they're active and if there's data hosted on them. Similarly, if the scanning services did it with all the dark web sites, they would only be the public ones. This is because the only things cannot see. Sensitive data is exchanged on private connections and not on easily accessible websites.
What is a Dark Web scanner, and how does it work?
It should be mentioned that not all sites on the Dark Web, the pages we can visit through Tor, are wrong or cybercriminals behind them. This means that not all content we can access may be illegal, but our security at risk.
A Dark Web scanner does not track all content. If it did, we wouldn't be talking about hidden pages. What it can do is search for lists of passwords or information that may have been filtered out. Let's imagine that our email account is for sale on the Dark Web. Also, our Facebook or Instagram account has been attacked.
What a Dark Web scanner does is search for specific information that interests us. In this way, it shows us if it has been attacked or not.
However, we must bear in mind that it would only have access to possible information leaks. Not all stolen or attacked content has to be openly published. It helps us to know if our accounts have been attacked, but if we can't find information that doesn't indicate this, it doesn't mean that we are 100% sure.
Behind the Dark Web, there are many services available. One of them is called “Have I Been Pwned”, for example. Here we can put our email account and check if you have suffered an attack. A way to make sure, or at least discard within our possibilities, that the account has suffered an attack or not.
If we see that our account is listed, we will have to take immediate action. The first thing is to change your access credentials as soon as possible. But we will also have to do so for all accounts related to that particular one. We'll even block our bank accounts if they're linked to our email.
What does the scanning of the dark web do?
As it may seem obvious, no company offering dark web scans will tell you what they do. However, with some certainty, we can tell you what they do, based on information. So, companies collect a set of public data in some famous sites within the dark web.
Likewise, these companies make data dumps, which are no more than big databases full of usernames and passwords. As well as the numbers of the credit cards associated with your name. Criminals steal this information and publish it on dark web sites.
Tips to avoid becoming a victim
Some of the tips to avoid this kind of problem is to have strong and complex passwords. You have to have a different one in each case. This way, we will prevent that; if our email account is stolen, they can also access other services. They must be different passwords.
You have to be very careful with phishing and methods by which they could steal your credentials. Cyber-crooks use strategies, such as social engineering, to steal victims' passwords.
The hard truth of all this is that your data has probably been compromised. Don't beat around the bush, and don't pay large sums of money to have what you already know half-repeated. So, the reality is that hackers and any criminals probably already have your credit card information. Added to this, you can see in the news the outrageous figures of private data being breached.
As a result, millions of people have been victims of data breaches, including those related to their social security numbers. Twenty-one million people in the United States alone. All over the world, millions of people have done it too. And that, only the leaks have been public. You can imagine those that are not or those that have not been detected yet. If we look at the statistics, the majority of people have been harmed.
In short, a Dark Web scanner could help us protect our accounts by providing information on whether they have been stolen, a way of warning.
