10 Dark Web Facts You Need to See Right Now

Let Dark Web Facts (Not Hype) Inform Your Security Decisions

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Dark web threats are growing increasingly more dangerous as a booming dark web economy drives cybercrime to new heights, setting records for phishing, hacking and (of course) ransomware. This cybercrime wave is creating additional pressure on already overstressed cybersecurity teams. But there’s a lot of hype out there about the dark web that’s designed to scare instead of inform. Let’s cut through the noise with some real dark web facts.

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Don’t make decisions about your organization’s security posture until you see these essential 2021 Dark Web facts.

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• Dark Web activity has increased by 300% in the last 3 years. 
• Over 30% of North Americans access the dark web regularly. 
•  In 2020, credentials for about 133,927 C-level Fortune 1000 executives were available on the dark web
• More than 22 billion new records were added to the dark web in 2020
• Satellite affiliates of cybercrime gangs pay the boss gang 10 – 20% of the take on each successful job
• An astonishing 25,927,476 passwords that belong to employees at Fortune 1000 companies were available readily in dark web markets and data dumps.
• About 65% of active criminal gangs rely on spear phishing powered by dark web data to launch attacks.
• The largest credential file to ever hit the dark web at once is the RockYou2021 password leak.  
• Hackers attack every 39 seconds, on average 2,244 times a day.  
• 60% of the information available on the Dark Web could potentially harm enterprises. 

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What’s For Sale on the Dark Web?

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In addition to information, Dark Web markets also deal in other nefarious things like criminal services, espionage, illegal collectibles or animals, human trafficking, credit card numbers, drugs, guns, counterfeit money, stolen goods, cybercrime software, cracked credentials and other illicit items. Cybercriminals also enjoy gambling and all sorts of strange things are in the pot at dark web online poker games.

In a recent breakdown of activity in popular dark web forums, researchers noted:

• An estimated 90% of posts on dark web forums are from buyers looking to contract someone for cybercrime. 
• Almost 70% of dark web forum hiring posts were looking for cybercriminals to do some website hacking.
• Over 20% were looking for bad actors who could obtain specifically targeted user or client databases.  
• About 7% of forum posts were ads for hackers looking for work.
• 2% of forum posts were made by cybercriminal developers who were selling the tools

Learn more about:

• How do cybercrime-as-a-service freelancing, hiring and business transactions work on the dark web? Learn more>>
• How do gangs pull off ransomware operations and who gets paid? Find out now>>
• How much cybercrime risk is real and how much is hype? See the data>>

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Who is Using the Dark Web & Why?

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Users primarily access the dark web using the TOR browser. More than 2 million active users connect to the dark web through the TOR browser every day.

Country	Mean daily users
Russia	9982 (21.80 %)
United States	6324 (13.81 %)
Iran	3324 (7.26 %)
Germany	2096 (4.58 %)
Belarus	1791 (3.91 %)
Brazil	1711 (3.74 %)
India	1487 (3.25 %)
China	1391 (3.04 %)
United Kingdom	1299 (2.84 %)
Turkey	1019 (2.23 %)

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Trust the Award-Winning ID Agent Risk Protection Platform Starring Passly, BullPhish ID & Dark Web ID to Secure Your Business Against Dark Web Threats

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Give your IT team an edge in the fight against dark web threats with the ID agent digital risk protection platform. 

• Passly includes an array of secure identity and access management tools cited by experts as key security moves that add immediate protection against the results of social engineering. Essentials like multifactor authentication make phished passwords useless and single sign-on to make access control easy and avoid credential sharing. 
• Dark Web ID enables you to get a clear picture of your company’s credential compromise threats from dark web sources. Our 24/7/365 always-on monitoring alerts businesses to credentials appearing on the dark web that may have been stolen or phished to mitigate the risk of bad actors using a stolen password to gain access to your systems and data.
• BullPhish ID improves your staff’s security awareness and increases phishing resistance and equips them to sniff out complex social engineering threats. Fully customizable content means that businesses can run simulations based on the real threats that they receive every day.    
• Don’t just take our word for it: Watch these 10-minute demonstration videos: https://www.idagent.com/learn-more

Contact the experts at ID Agent today to see how our solutions can protect your business from cybercrime for less. 

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