The Truth About Dark Web Scans

The dark web is often portrayed like a horror movie, and for good reason. The best horror movies rely on fear of the unknown: the unseen monster picking off the spaceship crew one by one, or the ancient menace sensed only as a ripple in the water or a tremor in the ground. Those monsters are a lot like identity fraud. With billions of identities compromised over years of data breaches, malware attacks, and phishing scams, we all know that identity thieves are out there, waiting to strike. It’s a grim scenario. Fortunately, like the heroes of our favorite horror movies, some of us find tools to fight back.

If you haven’t heard of the dark web, it’s an encrypted portion of the World Wide Web that is only accessible with special software, so users can be anonymous or untraceable. Criminals use its anonymity to purvey child pornography and other unsavory products, including stolen personal information. Law enforcement agencies have long monitored the dark web for signs of data breaches, and now, individuals can use dark web scans to see if their personal information has come up for sale on its black markets. However, all dark web scans are not created equal.

A powerful dark web scan searches for multiple identity elements across vast numbers of records posted on the dark web. A recent blog on How-To Geek questioned the value of simple dark web scans, which don’t provide much more information than the free dark web password searches offered by Have I Been Pwned?. Have I Been Pwned? currently does a simple search for one supplied password on 322 data dumps from dark websites.

The How-To Geek blog also pointed out the obvious: with the vast numbers and size of recent data breaches, you can assume that your information is already on the dark web. However, that makes a powerful dark web scan even more valuable, especially when combined with an identity protection service like IDX Identity. If you learn which personal information is exposed, you can get expert help in preventing it from being misused.

Sure, ID theft is a serious threat, and there’s no 100% protection against it. You can’t 100% protect against fires, either. That doesn’t lessen the value of smoke alarms; it makes them essential to protecting against and limiting damage if the worst should happen. That’s why IDX wants you to think of its IDX Identity monitoring services as your smoke alarm for identity theft.

In an upcoming series of blogs, we’ll delve more into the workings of the dark web: how stolen personal data is combined into theft-ready identity bundles, how criminals monetize stolen identities, and how you’ll be able to use early warnings to protect yourself. The menace of identity fraud is ever-present, but that just means it’s time to fight back!