Some of the best intelligence an operator or decision-maker can obtain comes straight from the belly of the beast. That’s why dark web intelligence can be incredibly valuable to your security operations center (SOC). By leveraging this critical information, operators can gain a better understanding of the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) employed by threat actors. With that knowledge in hand, decision-makers can better position themselves to protect their organizations.
This is in line with the classic teachings from Sun Tzu about knowing your enemy, and the entire passage containing that advice is particularly relevant to cybersecurity:
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
Let’s translate the middle section of this passage into colloquial cybersecurity talk: You can have the best security operations center in the world with outstanding cyber hygiene, but if you aren’t feeding it the right information, you may suffer defeats — and much of that information comes from dark web intelligence.
Completing Your Threat Intelligence Picture
To be candid, if you’re not looking at the dark web, there is a big gap in your security posture. Why? Because that’s where a lot of serious action happens. To paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, the greatest defense against a cyber menace is to attack the enemy’s operations as near as possible to the point of departure.
Now, this is not a call to get too wrapped up in the dark web. Rather, a solid approach would be to go where the nefarious acts are being discussed and planned so you can take the appropriate proactive steps to prevent an attack on your assets.
The first step is to ensure that you have a basic understanding of the dark web. One common way to communicate over the dark web involves using peer-to-peer networks on Tor and I2P (Invisible Internet Project). In short, both networks are designed to provide secure communications and hide all types of information. Yes, this is only a basic illustration of dark web communications, but if your security operations center aims to improve its capabilities in the dark web intelligence space, you must be able to explain the dark web in these simple terms for two reasons:
- You cannot access these sites as you would any other website.
- You’re going to have to warn your superiors what you’re up to. The dark web is an unsavory place, full of illegal content. Your decision-makers need to know what will be happening with their assets at a high level, which makes it vitally important to speak their language.
And this part is critical: If you want to get the most out of dark web intelligence, you may have to put on a mask and appear to “be one of the bad guys.” You will need to explain to your decision-makers why full-time staff might have to spend entire days as someone else. This is necessary because when you start searching for granular details related to your organization, you may have to secure the trust of malicious actors to gain entry into their circles. That’s where the truly rich intelligence is.
This could involve transacting in bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies, stumbling upon things the average person would rather not see, trying to decipher between coded language and broken language, and the typical challenges that come with putting up an act — all so you can become a trusted persona. Just like any other relationship you develop in life, this doesn’t happen overnight.
Of course, there are organizations out there that can provide their own “personas” for a fee and do the work for you. Using these services can be advantageous for small and medium businesses that may not have the resources to do all of this on their own. But the bigger your enterprise is, the more likely it becomes that you will want these capabilities in-house. In general, it’s also a characteristic of good operational security to be able to do this in-house.
Determining What Intelligence You Need
One of the most difficult challenges you will face when you decide to integrate dark web intelligence into your daily operations is figuring out what intelligence could help your organization. A good start is to cluster the information you might collect into groups. Here are some primer questions you can use to develop these groups:
- What applies to the cybersecurity world in general?
- What applies to your industry?
- What applies to your organization?
- What applies to your people?
For the first question, there are plenty of service providers who make it their business to scour the dark web and collect such information. This is an area where it may make more sense to rely on these service providers and integrate their knowledge feeds into existing ones within your security operations center. With the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to manage and make sense of all these data points, you can certainly create a good defensive perimeter and take remediation steps if you identify gaps in your network.
It’s the second, third and fourth clusters that may require some tailoring and additional resources. Certain service providers can provide industry-specific dark web intelligence — and you would be wise to integrate that into your workflow — but at the levels of your organization and its people, you will need to do the work on your own. Effectively, you would be doing human intelligence work on the dark web.
Why Human Operators Will Always Be Needed
No matter how far technological protections advance, when places like the dark web exist, there will always be the human element to worry about. We’re not yet at the stage where machines are deciding what to target — it’s still humans who make those decisions.
Therefore, having top-level, industrywide information feeds can be great and even necessary, but it may not be enough. You need to get into the weeds here because when malicious actors move on a specific target, that organization has to play a large role in protecting itself with specific threat intelligence. A key component of ensuring protections are in place is knowing what people are saying about you, even on the dark web.
As Sun Tzu said: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” There’s a lot of wisdom in that, even if it was said some 2,500 years ago.
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