Tech Blog – The Dark Web and Email Scanning. Is it Worth It?

Admittedly, I never gave much thought to the “Dark Web” until I saw marketing pushes on my television telling me that’s where my personal data was. I don’t like not knowing about something, especially when it’s presented in a sinister, scare-tactic posture. This type of marketing just ignites my obstinate side, and usually I’m determined to disprove their claims.  With that in mind, Derek and I did a little digging and want to share with you the facts we found.

Let’s start with Terminology

The Internet and The World Wide Web: Remember these two things are different. The Internet came to be in the 1960’s by DARPA as a militaristic solution to secure communication. It’s essentially the global networked devices using internet protocols to link it all together.  The World Wide Web sits on top of the Internet and uses the HTTP protocols to retrieve, assemble and present information to us.

Surface Web – This term refers to the segment of the web the public uses daily with a browser such as Mozilla or Chrome and has content delivered to us by a search engine, such as Google or Bing. Things here are indexed, meaning they can be found by the search engines.

Deep Web – If we get our information freely from the surface web, the deep web is where information is concealed. You can reach it, but it requires authentication through secure protocols such as HTTPS. (Think online banking. You must sign-in to access your service and can’t get to your accounts just by the search engine alone. That’s the deep web.) Its resources are not indexed and cannot be accessed by search engines.

Dark Web – The dark web is a part of and a subset of the deep web. Like the Deep Web, it is not accessed through normal means, is not indexed by surface web search engines, and requires special software, configurations and authentications to the private networks to enter.

Darknets – Black-market places within the dark web dealing with illicit goods or services.

Is it Illegal to Browse the Dark Web?

No. You can surf the dark web if you want to go through the time, money and effort to secure yourself.  We will not offer those instructions or provide links here, but they’re easily found with a simple web search. It’s how we collected some of the information offered in this blog. And in the interest of fairness, there are perfectly legitimate sites within the dark web. Scientific and medical journal sites, emailing systems, hosting systems, wiki’s, chat rooms, discussion boards and even what appears to be a version of Facebook.

The issue becomes in what you do, buy and sell, in these domains which determine legalities. Make no mistake, law enforcement and government agencies monitor the dark web and you are subject to the same laws as on the surface. Regardless, the dark web is not for the novice and you assume a lot of risk on entry, especially if you don’t take the appropriate precautions.

The Dark Side to the Dark Web

So, what is the allure to the dark web? Its single premise for the individual or groups is anonymity and the actions/transactions that are conducted anonymously through encrypted network communication. This ability to mask traffic paves the way for numerous marketplaces that exist in the exchange of illicit goods and services. The most famous (or infamous) example was the Silk Road darknet. This black-market site started within the dark web in 2011 and hidden behind special networks (Tor) perpetuated a large-scale launchpad for the sale of illegal drugs. It was shutdown, as were its successor sites, and those associated either jailed or choosing to abandon the effort due to law enforcement pressure.

Other marketplaces in the dark web are far-ranging in their scope and scale, your choices essentially limited to your imagination. Sites exist for extensive sales of drugs and weapons, sites for the purchase and distribution of stolen goods, pirated and bootleg software, movies and books, banking and bitcoin markets, hacking and scams programs, not to mention any flavor of adult content, legal or illegal.

Security and Identity Protections and What You Should Know About the Dark Web

Now we come back to the original question; Are the dark web scans worth it? The credit monitoring industry is a multi-billion-dollar profession and granted, companies that can build safe labs, establish teams of experts who understand the hardware and software intricacies, and recover from attacks are certainly better prepared for dark web intrusion than the average user. And once in, who knows which search engine to use and chat-rooms to check? In this sense they do serve a purpose.

But consider the sheer amount of data that resides in the dark web. The Department of Justice Statistics claim over 17 million Americans were victims to identity theft in 2015, although other references put the number closer to 41 million. With that in mind, take into account these major security breaches just from 2015 to 2018 alone:

• Saks Fith Avenue/Lord & Taylor: A possible 5 million credit card holders data compromised.
• Under Armour & MyFitnessPal: 150 million accounts, user names, email addresses and hashed passwords compromised.
• Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: Up to possibly 87 million user’s personal data used in political influence.
• Equifax: Over 145 million users with sensitive data stolen.
• Yahoo: Up to 3 billion accounts and their information, almost a third of those consisting of sensitive data were compromised.
• U.S. government federal employees: 22 million records were stolen.
• Anthem: 80 million accounts with sensitive data compromised.

Unfortunately, this is just a sampling, the list can go on. The idea is that with this amount of stolen or compromised data floating around the dark web, email scanning is bound to turn up something. And just because the initial scans are advertised as free does not mean you’ll be entitled to anything else, other than a sense of apprehension. The sales pitches follow and now costs can accumulate with companies offering packages ranging from $10 to $60 a month or more.

Understand we are in no way discouraging you to buy these scans and protections if they make you comfortable or if you’ve already been exposed to identity theft. Our intention is just to inform so you can make an educated decision.

But before you sign up for any services, read through the two investigative reports we found in our search in the references section. And know the Federal Trade Commission offers free plans and programs you can utilize.  You can also get your free credit reports from each of the top three credit companies through the site AnnualCreditReport.com. Space each out every four months and you can check your credit reports three times a year. Finally, Consumer Reports has listed some disadvantages associated with the credit monitoring companies and is definitely worth a read.

The choice to obtain credit monitoring services should be researched before committing to a lengthy plan. We hope we’ve provided beneficial information here you can use in that search. We’ll be providing more blogs on protecting yourself against identity theft soon.

Informative article on the Dark Web

LA Times Review on Scanning Services

First Coast News Review on Scanning Services

Quora Dark Web Search