Catching Dark Web Attacks before Zero Hour
August 30, 2016
Hacking still has an air of fantasy about it, because most people do not know how to do it. Some people cannot even wrap their head around how their information can be stolen off their computer, phone, or tablet, much less figuring out how to find the underbelly “Dark Web” Internet. Ignorance is a big hindrance, but thankfully there are experts who are striving to protect everyone else. Andrea Fortuna shares how “Scan The Deep Web Could Be Useful To Discover 0-Day Vulnerabilities?”.
A group at the University of Arizona wrote a paper called “Dark Net and Deep Net Mining For Proactive Cybersecurity Threat Intelligence” describing how they used machine learning and data mining programs to search the Dark Web for anything relating to malware and other malicious code sold for bitcoin. Their abstract states:
“In this paper, we present an operational system for cyber threat intelligence gathering from various social platforms on the Internet particularly sites on the Dark Net and Deep Net. We focus our attention to collecting information from hacker forum discussions and marketplaces offering products and services focusing on malicious hacking. We have developed an operational system for obtaining information from these sites for the purposes of identifying emerging cyber threats. Currently, this system collects on average 305 high-quality cyber threat warnings each week.
Andrea Fortuna includes an infographic about how the University of Arizona team’s data mining and machine learning system works. The system appears simplistic in its approach to scraping and parsing the Dark Web, but did the team encounter any problems by using the Tor browser and running through .onion addresses? Also, several years ago, a university Dark Web forum project produced an interesting demonstration of spidering text from the Dark Web.
Whitney Grace, August 30, 2016
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