With the internet playing an increasingly important role in organizations, it has become a great source of vulnerabilities. However, with internet investigation tools, the internet can be a useful tool in cyber defense.
This article will look at the various web investigation tools that security professionals can use to stop cyber attacks before they happen. But before we get into that, let’s look at why the internet is so important in cyber security.
The Value of the Internet in Cyber Defense
It is common knowledge that the internet is a valuable resource to attackers. It provides a variety of ways for threat actors to exploit the vulnerabilities of an organization. For example, they can use phishing attempts targeted at employees. And with the development of the dark web, they can carry out illegal transactions that facilitate attacks on organizations.
Below are some ways through which the dark web benefits threat actors:
- The dark web facilitates collaboration between threat actors, including the formation of alliances to carry out attacks against high-value targets.
- The dark web is a reliable marketplace for a wide variety of attack tools including malware and cutting-edge attack software.
- With decentralized forms of payment such as cryptocurrency, the dark web facilitates illegal financial payments that are difficult for the authorities to trace.
- The dark web is used to trade information that threat actors can use to orchestrate attacks against organizations. Such information includes breached access credentials.
However, with web investigation tools, cyber security professionals can leverage the internet for proactive defense in the following ways:
- By using the appropriate tools to monitor the dark web, security analysts can receive real-time alerts whenever a keyword related to an organization appears. This could alert an organization to a data breach.
- Financial institutions can use web investigation tools for financial crime threat prevention. Such tools help financial analysts collect intelligence for Anti-Money Laundering and Know-Your-Client purposes.
- Web investigation tools can help organizations stay on top of unfolding events. Such situational awareness can help detect the heightened probability of attacks, allowing mitigative action to be taken.
- Security analysts can use web investigation software to document evidence regarding the identities and activities of threat actors. This information can be used during prosecution, which increases the chances of prosecution success.
An Overview of Internet Investigation Tools
At the center of all web investigation efforts, including financial crime threat prevention, is data.
When most people use the internet, they leave a digital footprint. This can be as obvious as a post or comment that a threat actor made on an online forum in the surface web. It can also be more difficult to access, for example if the online forum is a site on the dark web that can only be accessed by a special tor browser and with an exact uniform resource locator (URL).
For web investigation to be effective, all pertinent data must be gathered and collated. It must then be processed and turned into useful and actionable insights.
AI crime prediction software comes in handy because it enables the application of artificial intelligence to the analysis of the big data that is synonymous with web intelligence.
There are multiple sources of data for web investigation.
Data Collection
Data collection is a crucial step in web investigation. Ideally, the data should be open source. It should not be illegally accessed. Moreover, its access and use should not violate data privacy regulations.
Open source intelligence can be acquired from all levels of the web, including the surface and deep web. However, when it comes to threat actors and their activities, the most important information is found on the dark web.
Sources of open source intelligence include blogs posts, websites, forums, comments, public data repositories, government directories, and so on.
You can access such data with the help of a range of open source intelligence tools, some open-source and free and others proprietary and paid for.
However, you can also use just one tool, a fully-fledged AI crime prediction software that aggregates data from all major sources. The advantage of this is that the investigation process becomes a lot easier because you are using one tool. This also means that you spend less time.
Additionally, with a fully-fledged web investigation software, artificial intelligence does most of the heavy lifting for you. All you have to deal with are the high-level tasks.
