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Protect your identity and business with a consistent watchdog service

We’ve all read about the constant barrage of cyberattacks on businesses and the nightmare that comes from having your personal identity stolen. There are ways to reduce the odds that your business will suffer such an attack or that your personal information will be hacked. One of the best methods for protecting both your business and your identity as well as that of your family is consistent monitoring of the Dark Web.

What Is the Dark Web?

The Dark Web is just what it sounds like. It’s the shady side of the internet. The Dark Web lays in a sub layer of the internet known at the “Deep Web.” This is a place hidden from conventional search engines where criminals often roam searching for their next victim.

Believe it or not, common search engines including Google, Bing, and Yahoo simply scratch the surface of what is actually available online. Such search engines hunt just .04 percent of the indexed internet. The other 99.96 percent of the web consists of databases, private academic and government networks, and the Dark Web, according to ID Agent, which provides comprehensive threat intelligence and identity monitoring solutions for both individuals and businesses through ORAM Corporate Advisors.

What Threat Does the Dark Web Pose?

Not only is the Dark Web a place that threatens your personal identity but it can endanger your business as well. This is a place where the signature pieces of your personal identity (name, date of birth, stolen passwords, and even social security numbers) can be sold daily to the highest bidder. Everything from your credentials such as email logins, passwords, and usernames can be found there.

With such personal information, criminals can hack your email, your bank accounts, and more. They can open new credit card accounts in your name without your knowledge and rack up untold sums of debt before you’re even aware there’s a problem. The threat of personal identity theft can extend beyond you as well to other family members such as your spouse, your children, and your parents.

The loss of such personal information can be devastating to your business, too. Critical business information such as business applications, email, and other online services can be penetrated with your personal information. Logins and passwords can be changed, business information can be accessed and stolen, and your organization can be brought to a complete halt with the personally identifiable information (PII) bad actors are hocking on the Dark Web. Read the ORAM blog “The Dark Web: What It Is, How It Impacts Your Organization, and Ways to Protect Your Business” for more detailed information about the severity of the threat your business faces as a result of the Dark Web.

Protecting Yourself, Your Family, and Your Business

The most effective way of protecting your PII, your family members’ PII, and your business is through Dark Web monitoring. ORAM uses SpotLight ID, which employs Dark Web ID, to monitor your identity and that of your covered family members. Through leveraging Dark Web ID, ORAM focuses on the cyber threats specific to you and the environment you work in. Our proprietary software continuously monitors the Dark Web and the digital criminal underground to determine if our clients’ credentials have been exposed.

With SpotLight ID, ORAM searches for your personal information on the Dark Web. If found, your data is harvested to protect it from typical hacker sites such as Pastebin. Many such sites frequented by cybercriminals require a membership and credibility to enter. Our monitoring system allows us access to search more than 500 internet relay chatroom (IRC) channels, 600,000 private websites, and 600 Twitter feeds utilized by bad actors.

Furthermore, SpotLight ID executes 10,000 queries daily to help monitor and protect your identity and those of the people you love. We also monitor and source information from hidden theft forums, peer-to-peer file sharing programs and networks, and social media. We can even find compromised data harvested through botnets and command and control (C2) servers.

Be On Alert

If your information is identified on the Dark Web, we notify you immediately. This allows you the opportunity to change your logins and passwords before cybercriminals can take advantage of the information they have. This also gives you time to consult with your business’s internal or external IT team as soon as possible to determine if a data breach or cyber incident has occurred using your credentials. Such monitoring and notification can buy your business the time it needs to change your username, login, and password before cybercriminals can strike against it.

In addition to monitoring the Dark Web for your PII, ORAM will alert you if someone actively targets you or your covered family members’ social media profiles. You’ll also receive instant updates, alerts, and access to your credit from all three major credit bureaus if something changes with your credit or that of your covered family members.

Monitoring of the Dark Web also gives you peace of mind that your identity and that of family is covered. With a team of U.S.-based Certified Identity Restoration Specialists, ORAM will work to completely restore your identity should the worst happen, even if the issue began before you enrolled for coverage. You can take even more comfort in knowing that with SpotLight ID, you have up to $1 million in identity insurance to cover related restoration expenses if needed.

If you are interested in learning more about SpotLight ID or registering in one of our affordable and flexible plans, contact ORAM Corporate Advisors online now or call us at (617) 933-5060. The cybersecurity experts at ORAM are here to protect you, your family, and your business from the threat of cybercrime.

Just recently I had a client contact me here at Oram about a serious security issue. Another business they work with was hacked and it nearly ended up costing my client big money. The worst part about the whole situation is that with the right technology in place, it could have been easily prevented.

The Problem Hack

The client called in to say he had wired his travel agent about €1.4 million (or roughly $1.63 million U.S.) for an extended European family vacation. Well, lo and behold, the travel agency’s email was hacked. Turns out a hacker, not the travel agent, had been communicating with my client for the entire month. My client thought he was planning this event with the travel agent when, in fact, he was communicating with a cybercriminal. Everything culminated when the hacker, posing as the agent, sent my client the wiring instructions for the funds.

The way that this hack presented itself was that a person in Germany deployed a phishing scheme to compromise the travel agent’s email. The hacker had been monitoring the agent’s email for a number of weeks and was just waiting for some event like my client’s to occur so they could then interrupt the communications.

The reason the travel agent was none the wiser is that the hacker also set up rules in the mailbox so that any time a communication came in from my client, it would go straight into the deleted items. This made it so the travel agent had no idea that someone else was communicating by email with my client.

Luckily, this scenario ended on a positive note. My client was able to get all of his money back. The FBI is now involved with the situation to try and catch this criminal. Without Oram, the travel agency would never have been alerted to the hack and may have seen more of its customers defrauded of their funds.

Passwords Aren’t Enough

The reality is that the majority of data breaches occurring today are the result of compromised authentication. Though having a strong password is a great start for implementing security, just having this one step in place can leave your network incredibly vulnerable. That’s why multi-factor authentication (MFA) is so important, particularly for securing your business’s most valuable data.

According to the 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study by the Ponemon Institute, data breaches cost businesses millions of dollars each year in the U.S. alone. The study also shows the likelihood of a business experiencing a recurring material data breach within the next two years after an initial hack is nearly 28 percent. Data breaches are the most expensive to deal with in the United States and Canada, costing $225 million and $190 million respectively. The average total organizational cost of breaches in the United States found in the 2017 study was a whopping $7.35 million.

Why Your Email Is Key

The reason hackers want into your email is that it can lead to a huge payday. With access to your email, a cybercriminal can log into any account you have by simply clicking on “forgot my password.” This allows them to create a new password using your email.

Access to your email allows criminals to create new, fraudulent accounts in your name. They can use your identity and email address to open new accounts and create their own passwords. From there, the possibilities are limitless from ordering goods online to withdrawing your entire life savings.

In addition to your business being negatively impacted, the friends and connections in your email network can also be put at risk for infection. Or, in the case of my client, hackers can steal access to your clients and could possibly ruin solid business relationships. Many criminals even sell access to hacked email accounts on the black market. The amount of damage that can be done in less than an hour is astounding.

How It Works

Multi-factor authentication is a security system that requires more than one method of authentication to verify a user’s identity. This can range from requiring passwords that must periodically be changed by legitimate users to requiring a one-time PIN provided via smartphone for access.

Without having all of the required pieces of information, a user would not be able to log in successfully. This means better protection for you and your business. Multi-factor authentication can help secure everything on your business network from logging into your server to shared resources and employees who bring their own devices to work. Some larger organizations that use MFA that you are probably familiar with include Google and PayPal. Most financial and medical institutions also employ MFA as well.

Our Recommendation

The moral of the story is that whether you are using personal email or corporate email, you need MFA. Had my client’s travel agent employed MFA, this hack would likely have never occurred. The would-be criminal would have likely hit a brick wall of security and moved on to a less secure target.

While Oram already recommends multifactor authentication, going forward, we are requiring our clients to utilize MFA for everything possible from email and icloud accounts to banking and financial sites. The reasoning behind this is that MFA significantly reduces the risk that a cybercriminal could access your most important systems. Additionally, it adds extra layers of security that will make your network and other proprietary systems that much more difficult to breach.

If you would like to learn more about multi-factor authentication or other ways to better secure your business, we are happy to assist you. Call Oram today at (617) 933-5060 or visit us online.