Some of the threats facing your organization are still on the web today: What they are and where they’re hiding

The online presence you can’t control

Your external online presence is bigger than ever. This is much more than the amount of likes you have on your Facebook page or the number of retweets on your last Twitter post (though we hope those are growing). The internet itself is, and has been for a long time, expanding, at such a rapid rate that it’s difficult to put a number on it. The web is more important than ever for businesses seeking to engage prospective customers and retain current ones. Brand awareness, reputation and integrity ride on an organization’s ability to maintain a digital presence that is consistent with the message and value they deliver to consumers. With the web landscape ever-expanding, the cost of digital risks to organizations is largely unmonitored and unrecognized. Once organizations start to identify social and digital risks, they begin to recognize their growing frequency, their impact and, ultimately, their costs.

It’s an overwhelming realization for many. Even the most veteran security professional struggles to keep up with the frequency of new threats, new actors and new battlegrounds on which these threats are posed. Here are where a few of the top threats posed on your organization are hiding across the surface, deep and dark web:

Forums and blogs

Do your customers use forums and review sites to make purchase decisions? With the rise of review and rating sites, your brand and product reputation can be put at risk by a single angry, or fake, customer. Online threat actors pretending to be your customers turn to forums and blogs for many reasons, and none of them are good for your business. Here are just a few ways they use these tools for more harm than good:

• Slander and abuse: Fake reviews can unintentionally thwart potential prospects.
• Copyright infringement: Hackers seek to steal and sell your intellectual property to unsuspecting customers looking for a deal.
• Customer targeted scams: Bad actors are looking for places where  your customers are already interacting with you and with each other.
• Cyber attack planning: Forums provide the tools bad actors need to plan, collaborate and coordinate cyber attacks before they even happen.

Marketplaces, Crowdfunding and eCommerce

Many of the digital risks posed across the web are tied to revenue. From customer targeted scams, piracy and fake promos, hackers and other threat actors seek to make a few bucks off your loss of profit.

And what better place to make a profit than sites where they know your customers are ready to buy? In 2018, online shopping has become a typical activity for the everyday American. In fact, 96% of Americans with internet access have made an online purchase in their life, 80% in the past month alone. Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, Amazon, Alibaba, Ebay and more have become hubs for businesses small and large to sell their goods directly to consumers. Crowdfunding sites like Gofundme and Crowdrise offer worthy causes the opportunity to solicit donations. But counterfeiting and crowdfunding scams unfortunately exist at both the point of sale and at the point of distribution across these platforms.

ZeroFox addresses this problem head on at both the point of sale and the point of distribution by removing it at its source. By identifying scams and counterfeits before your customers, you can keep your profits up and your reputation intact.

Web Search

The web’s best crawling and “search” engines, Google and Microsoft, provide a wealth of opportunity while also opening the door to a plethora of threats. Consumers looking for a good deal with a simple web search for a sporting event can end up unintentionally purchasing fake tickets on sites such as Ebay and Craigslist. Ticket scams and other counterfeit items are unfortunately not at all uncommon on reseller sites such as these, making it difficult for consumers that are searching through listings to decipher between real and fake. ZeroFox’s content-based web searches help identify phishing pages that are missed by traditional domain or subdomain searching. With advanced web search alerts, ZeroFox informs you immediately if your information is at risk.

Deep and Dark

The dark and deep web represent the portion of the Internet that is hidden from the previously mentioned conventional search engines, and in the case of the dark web, uses masked IP addresses, and is typically accessible only with a special web browser.

The dark and deep web frequently exploit this anonymity to:

• Share exploits and TTPs
• Conduct data breaches and exfiltrated dumps
• Transfer sensitive information (corporate espionage)
• Plan and execute cyber attacks against organizations
• Sell illegally acquired data or counterfeit/illegal goods on black markets

ZeroFox monitors the deep and dark web marketplaces, sites and forums to enhance organizations’ visibility and improve overall digital risk protection. This includes the detection of phishing attempts, actionable attack intelligence, trademark and copyright infringement, exposure of sensitive data and compromised credentials and PII.

From awareness to action

Now that you know where the digital risks on the web reside, how do you 1) decipher what is a true threat to your organization and 2) take action against those threats? That’s where ZeroFox comes in. Our machine learning tools and global threat analysts identify, validate, and remediate threats facing your organization across surface and deep web channels. Machine learning techniques can predict if something is malicious without ever having encountered it previously in a way that human analysis cannot. ZeroFox’s deep and dark data sources enable organizations to discover, monitor and alert on sensitive data related to their brands, employees and customers. This comprehensive coverage is comprised of over 680 million posts indexed per day, 75 million crawled pages, 115 languages, 120 countries and over 100 terabytes of historical data. Once a threat is identified, quickly request to take action in the form of hiding, removing or deleting posts from right within the platform.

Want to learn more about ZeroFox’s web protection offerings? Check out more information here.