Dark Web monitoring uses for Penetration Testing

Penetration testing and Ethical hacking exercises simulate an attacker’s technique to break into vulnerable applications.

According to the 2022 DBIR Verizon report, roughly 80% of attacks on web applications leverage stolen credentials. And 81% of data breaches leverage stolen or weak passwords. Dark web monitoring can mitigate this by alerting when credentials are found on the Dark Web and taking preventive measures.

With the recent change in attack vectors and techniques cybersecurity specialists must change their testing techniques to reflect the latest strategies used by cybercriminals.

Using dark Web Scans for Penetration tests

Dark web monitoring is a powerful tool for testing the security of online systems and internal networks. With this service cybersecurity specialists performing penetration tests and ethical hacking exercises can scan the dark web to look for compromised credentials, disclosed vulnerabilities or confidential data that could compromise customer systems.

Additionally, this service may also be used to extract information about the most vulnerable users and include these risks in the final report.

How attackers leverage stolen credentials to access applications

According to the National Cyber Security Alliance, 47 percent of all SMBs were hit by a successful cyberattack, and of that number, 60 percent went out of business. Most hacking-related breaches leverage stolen or weak passwords that are often exposed in the DarkWeb and then used by cyber criminals to access employee accounts in enterprise applications. This strategy is especially effective considering that roughly 72 percent of people reuse one or two passwords everywhere.

When an online service is compromised and user credentials are stolen, they usually end up being traded on the Dark Web. These credentials are then purchased and used by malicious actors to gain access to enterprise systems and other services that share the same or similar email/user and password.