

Now, imagine the data problem created in attempting to parse out relevant chatter about the Target brand from the rest of the noise on the internet. Then there’s something I call “the Target problem.” Target is a retail chain with stores in the United States, Canada, and India - many of you may be familiar with the brand.Keep this in mind if someone mentions they are going to Iowa next month it might be a lot more exciting than it sounds.
The internet iceberg software#
How does your translation software handle slang? Without specific knowledge of a particular group, you would have no idea they are using the code name “Iowa” when describing a target in Iran.How is this being done at the same scale as collection? Very few, if any, public sector vendors have swaths of analysts translating everything on the dark web on a daily basis from languages such as Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, Russian, and Mandarin.Where things get interesting is trying to exploit this data to get something useful on an analyst’s desk. If you think that is a big deal, I have a regular expression (regex) to sell you. Processing is frequently discussed as stripping out things like HTML tags from the raw data that’s been collected. And There’s Big Problems With ThatĪfter collection, the next challenge would be processing and exploitation. Any Company Selling You On “Dark Web Intelligence” Is Only Talking About Its Collection Strategy. As someone who evaluates these vendors, many of them don’t either. to remind you that they have access to all this stuff under the surface that you don’t. The use of the iceberg metaphor is a clever bit of psychological warfare. To say this is a commodity capability would be a major understatement, as the ability to automate the scraping of websites is as old as the internet, and as we’ve established, dark networks really just reflect a difference in protocol selection. Be wary that some “dark web intelligence” offerings skip the hard part and are just using technical collection to scrape information from essentially public markets and forums. I Registered For Access, And All I Got Was This Low-Confidence Assessmentĭeveloping personas to obtain and, more importantly, maintain access is time-consuming and most of the work involved with good tradecraft on the dark web. It’s also not uncommon when law enforcement takes control of a hidden site only for them to continue hosting it in hopes of deanonymizing the users of the site. Also remember that there’s no guarantee the person behind the persona you are interacting with isn’t a criminal, a threat intel company, or possibly even law enforcement! The story of the Besa Mafia is a great example of criminals scamming criminals, getting hacked themselves, and then law enforcement arresting people who were trying to hire these fake hitmen. Because of this, the reputation of your developed persona is the only currency you truly have.

Anonymous networks help segment your actual identity from the persona (or avatar) you develop on these dark nets. This is an often-ignored part of dark web marketing. The quality of your collection strategy dictates how confident you can be in your analysis. On Anonymous Networks, Reputation Is Everything There are many of these dark net protocols, but Tor is by far the most common, likely because of its use of exit nodes to allow a user to obtain anonymity on the public internet by routing traffic across the Tor network. While TLS is designed to provide confidentiality and identity, dark web protocols are designed to provide confidentiality and anonymity. The green lock on your URL bar is an assurance, but not a guarantee, that you’re communicating confidentially with who you think you are.
The internet iceberg series#
The Dark Web Is Nothing Fancy It’s Really Just A Different Series Of ProtocolsĬommonly when surfing the web, Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the cryptographic protocol that provides confidentiality for your communication with the server.
