In today's tech realm, data breaches have become commonplace to business environments that use the internet.
These breaches have been known to permeate even the most secure of network structures, regardless of the nature of protocols guarding their corridors.
The dire need for data monitoring gave birth to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that discovers and punishes the perpetrators of data breaches. Certainly, the GDPR cannot exist without the mention of dark web monitoring.
Dark web monitoring, also called deep web monitoring, is a discipline that extends beyond your typical identity protection service.
Fundamentally, identity protection services are tied to the function of providing alerts to users whenever a data breach has occurred. To meet this need, online security innovators tend to collaborate with industry players to ensure the safety of organizational data.
RepKnight, a dark web monitoring guru, is one such entity that has used cutting edge innovation to police the dark web. In their latest development, the organization has announced its partnership with StarLink, a security advisory company.
The pan-EMEA agreement between the two companies allows StarLink to involve RepKnight's BreachAlert in its portfolio.
Commenting on the June 2018 event, RepKnight's Channel Director welcomed the new move to tackle the looming dark web-related data breach crisis. This highlights the appreciable amount of momentum that is being mobilized around RepKnight's BreachAlert platform.
In his words, it is high time that organizations embrace the emerging technologies surrounding dark web monitoring. Further, IT security organizations must upscale their portfolio to accommodate innovations that strive to secure the internet and protect users across the tech divide.
To reiterate, Avinash Advani, a StarLink executive, commented on the achievement by acknowledging his company's attitude towards dark web monitoring. According to Advani, the dark web can be likened to a highly potent weapon on standby that continually seeks to destroy enterprises across the globe. In this respect, dark web monitoring becomes imperative to all industry players if professionalism and profitability is to be upheld.
Ultimately, the StarLink official appreciated the offerings of RepKnight's BreachAlert, which he said would fit well into his organization's business model.
What is BreachAlert?
BreachAlert is an IT security tool that was developed and launched in 2017 by RepKnight. It is a cloud-hosted platform that is highly sensitive to data breach incidents that are associated with the dark web.
The working principle of the tool enables it to detect and alert organizations whenever their data is breached, advertised or traded on the hidden web.
The Details
BreachAlert is a proactive tool that upholds cyber security through monitoring techniques.
It provides constant monitoring of infrastructures existing beyond the boundaries of network firewalls and targets millions of pages hosted on the dark web.
This includes a host of text dumpsites, such as PasteBin, which may be potential fodder for cybercrime activities.
Essentially, BreachAlert has been designed to:
- Provide an automated system of round-the-clock monitoring and alerting.
- Discover potential data breaches across the internet, including dark web platforms like Tor and PasteBin. This extends to a wide range of dump sites used by criminals in data security incidents.
- Construct multi-natured search expressions that employ key wording and definite data patterns.
- Scan the numeric spectrum of financial data owned by persons. This includes people's bank information, credit card numbers and IP addresses.
- Automatically mine and filter results within the context of domain names, bank information and IP addresses.
- Convey alerts to relevant parties via conventional communication channels such as email.
In a nutshell, BreachAlert is compliant with GDPR guidelines; it roams the interwebs in search of data being affixed to the dark web and dump sites attributed to cybercrime.
The platform operates like a simple burglar alarm that alerts users instantly as soon as their data shows up in its search patterns.
It gives timely warnings regarding potential data breaches and discovers staff user credentials that are illicitly obtained and posted on the dark web. Such personally identifiable information is typically handled by third-party websites that have orchestrated ambitious phishing and credential stuffing attacks in the past.
By so doing, BreachAlert goes a long way to safeguard the integrity of corporate networks, thus promoting the profitability of business models. This factor is especially important when considering that compromised data stands to be the main attack point for data breaches.
Ultimately, BreachAlert is considered to be an augmentation of generic threat intelligence feeds. In this taste, the tool moves in leaps and bounds for ensuring that security experts pinpoint their monitoring activities through keywording and the generation of instant alerts in cases involving cybercriminal discussions about topics associated with client data.
Tim Hayes, RepKnight's CEO, asserts that BreachAlert has the prerogative to traverse diverse platforms, and provides full confidence to its users regarding their dark web monitoring interventions - the application is a complete monitoring solution.
A Cascade of Meaningful Partnerships
Since the inception of BreachAlert, RepKnight has continually sought to pen important agreements with industry players in a bid to advance the security tool's global reach.
In October 2017, the organization launched a channel partner program that targeted the UK and European markets. The program gave permission to bona fide partners to resell the BreachAlert platform.
Highly Marketable Benefits
RepKnight's partners, also called channel partners, prefer the platform owing to its applicability. BreachAlert is the first dark web monitoring platform to be availed in the open space in the context of a channel program.
It is simple in design, easy to explicate and evaluate, and it attracts a competitive price in the industry. This makes the tool be a hot-selling product in juxtaposition with other security platforms in the market.
Clients may easily launch the BreachAlert platform rapidly as a standalone application just like they would deploy an email application. This attribute makes BreachAlert ideal for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Furthermore, the platform can be integrated with other security protocols to ensure super protection from cybercriminal attacks.
RepKnight's partner program is constituted on several layers that entail marketing and technical support, including a host of incentives. The channel program is sponsored by the RepKnight Academy, which includes a series of trainings that solidify partners' expertise in the field of cyber security.
This allows the participating parties to trade and support BreachAlert and other RepKnight products accordingly.
Case Example: An Agreement with The Launch Distribution B.V.
Apart from its agreement with StarLink, RepKnight's channel program welcomed a Dutch company, The Launch Distribution B.V., into its club of partners. This event occurred in May 2018, and saw the organization embracing the BreachAlert craze.
The partnership provides that The Launch Distribution B.V. will use BreachAlert as an addition to its already-existing portfolio of security and data management solutions targeting the Benelux market. This new frontier will allow the Benelux region to adopt cutting-edge technologies to combat dark web-linked data breaches.
According to The Launch Distribution B.V., a huge market exists in the Benelux region which demands high-quality data management solutions. The organization's Chief Executive Officer expressed his confidence in the new venture and cited RepKnight's reputation as a value that would cement their business relationship.
In his words, BreachAlert is going to be an exceedingly popular sell owing to its simplicity and the fact that users have no traditional mechanisms of tackling the dark web menace.
The Future of Dark Web Monitoring
Dark web monitoring has evolved to take an inside-out approach to cyber security.
It is becoming necessary for organizations to scour the internet outside the boundary of firewalls.
The inside-out approach tasks organizations with the need to comb the dark web extensively to mitigate potential cyber threats.
Expectedly, marking data may become a favorable data monitoring technique in the future. Some IT security establishments have approached this methodology by placing fake personal identifiable information (PII) on their corporate networks. They would deploy such fake data in the event of a data breach.
The security teams would then attempt to trace the fake data using other data monitoring solutions. In this case, the availability of the marked faked data on the dark web provides sufficient evidence regarding the occurrence of an actual data breach.
This method is actually similar to how law enforcement agencies use marked currency bills to trace drug dealers and other criminals.
Nonetheless, the applicability of this technique is disputable. This is because the method demands a thorough overhaul of the dark web, including a complex series of data processing and automation.
Ultimately, artificial intelligence (AI) may be integrated into this form of dark web monitoring to ensure efficient automation and scaling, but only time will tell whether this form of data breach detection will become standard practice among modern organizational models.
