Resecurity
today announced that its six-year effort to create the first
comprehensive index of the dark web is on track for completion by 2020.
The project, which began in stealth mode in 2014 and dives deeper into
the hidden recesses of the internet than any previous undertaking, is
expected to yield multiple petabytes of data that law enforcement
agencies and cybersecurity clients can use to thwart cybercrime and
investigate threat actors.
The dark web — those trackless parts of the internet that traditional
search engines do not index and where individuals mask their identities
through powerful anonymization tools — is home to innumerable hidden
marketplaces, communities, groups and forums used to traffic in illegal
goods and services — from child pornography, drugs and weapons to tools
for malware and ransomware distribution, even stolen data that can
affect national security.
The consequences of cybercrime originating from the dark web impact
nearly every industry and cost the global economy as much as $600
billion — about
0.8 percent of global GDP. Security industry experts project that
companies around the world could incur costs and lost revenue amounting
to more
than $5 trillion over the next five years due to cyberattacks.
“By definition,” said Gene Yoo, chief executive officer of Resecurity,
“the dark web is a completely uncontrolled and unregulated cross-border
ecosystem. It poses a problem whose scale is growing rapidly due to
cross-border legislation as well as technical barriers affecting law
enforcement. This gives cybercriminals enough freedom to perform illegal
activities in cyberspace that affect all elements of our society.”
Power of Big Data, Data Science and AI
Resecurity research calculates the total volume of dark web data in
circulation can be measured in petabytes (PBs) — and that doesn’t even
take into account the replication of data on dark web mirror sites. The
data is highly dynamic, too, as many of the underground communities
themselves will appear suddenly, disappear as suddenly, and later appear
again.
“There have been attempts in the past to scan the dark web, but the
tools that were available when those efforts were undertaken were
extremely primitive,” added Yoo. “They generated a lot of false
positives and noise — and not a lot of truly actionable intelligence. To
deliver the maximum visibility into the dark web, to get to the point
where we can associate a particular threat actor with his real identity,
we need to apply the power of data science and big data, which is
exactly what we’re doing at Resecurity.”
To analyze and store that much dynamic data in a retrospective form,
Resecurity relies on a range of advanced big data, data science and AI
technologies:
-
It has trained machine learning models and artificial intelligence
engines to recognize relevant content by category and to mine
meaningful information about threat actors and their operations in a
near real time. -
It captures and processes millions of dark web postings every day,
including textual, graphical and binary information (containing
attachments and other important artifacts), as well as metadata
associated with the postings and the posting sources. -
Cyberthreat intelligence analysts and cybercrime investigators
interacting with the data captured by Resecurity can view information
by thematic niche, community size (total number of actors and
published postings), update and activity dynamics, risk perspective,
and more to understand how to prioritize the key threat sources for
more systematic monitoring.
“We have built what is probably the largest dark web monitoring platform
ever developed,” said Mr. Yoo. “It’s storing massive amounts of data,
all of which can be acted upon, which is key to facilitating the
investigation of complex cybercrime cases.”
About Resecurity
Resecurity is a cybersecurity company that delivers an actionable
platform for endpoint protection, risk management, and threat
intelligence for large enterprises and government agencies worldwide.
The company is headquartered in Los Angeles. For more information on
Resecurity, please visit www.resecurity.com/,
and follow the company on LinkedIn
and Twitter.
All brand names and product names are trademarks or registered
trademarks of their respective companies.
Tags: Resecurity, dark web, cybersecurity, cybercrime, cyberthreat,
security, endpoint protection, risk management, threat intelligence,
artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, big data
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190423005390/en/