When we think of the internet sub-culture known as the dark web we often think of online forums selling drugs, weapons and stolen or illegal goods.
Knowing what goes on in the dark web can help businesses to find out if they have been breached and if their intellectual property is available online. From databases to medical records, criminals are trading all sorts of company assets obtained through hacking and making healthy profits from doing so. In addition to data and intellectual property, criminals are also selling the tools to obtain that information and even offering ‘hacking-as-a-service’ to do so.
Using platforms like Tor, which act as anonymising proxy networks by encrypting the traffic all the way to the final exit notes, hackers remain almost completely anonymous. With many large companies being bombarded with cyber-attacks all day, every day, some businesses are now realising that they need to colloborate and share their threat data, just as the criminals do, in order to try and keep their organisations as safe as possible.
“If you understand what they’re doing and how they’re doing it [the criminals], you can then prepare your defences better” said Nick Coleman, Global Head of Cyber Security Intelligence at IBM. “If you’re thinking about defence, you need to think about what’s happening in the adversary underworld.”
Combining two decades of security and cyber-threat data, IBM’s X-Force Exchange is a cloud-based platform that allows organizations to easily collaborate on security incidents, as well as benefit from the ongoing contributions of IBM experts and community members. In X-Force, you’re presented with a visualisation of real-time malicious IPs as well as recent vulnerabilities and trending risks, ranked by severity. This collaborative platform provides access to volumes of actionable IBM and third-party threat data from across the globe, including real-time indicators of live attacks, which can be used to defend against cybercrimes.
We recently spoke to Nick and Etay Moar, executive security advisor at IBM Security to find out more about the threat landscape and discuss ways business leaders can collaborate like the criminals.
Get more information about X-Force Exchange.
