In an almost increasingly common event, a company forgets the proper procedures in securing client data. With time, hackers uncover this and abuse the vulnerability to take all the company’s client data which could range from credit cards to social security numbers. As unrealistic as the above situation sounds, it is actually more common than you might expect. In fact, as recently as a few days ago, convenience store giant Wawa experienced a breach that resulted in 30 million records of its user’s credit card data getting stolen. Through Wawa’s breach alone, millions of people suddenly found themselves victims and in dire need to change their personal information. Among these breaches, the real question is what do hackers do with all this stolen data and where does the data end up?
In short, a lot of the time the data ends up on a completely different realm of cyberspace referred to as Dark Web. Such a realm is impossible to get to with browsers such as Safari and Chrome, and instead requires special software such as Tor to access it. To Dark Web expert David Harding, Chief Technology Officer at ImageWare Systems, it is in this realm where online black marketplaces exist where hackers buy and sell stolen information. Now that is great, hackers are selling your information on websites that you cannot even access. Well why can’t these sites be blocked, problem solved right?
In a common-sense solution, closing access to those sites seems like the obvious solution. However, due to the architecture of the dark web, such a task is difficult to accomplish. Since the dark web is “disconnected” from the internet we know, simply blocking sites won’t cut. As a result of the anonymity of the dark web and its hidden servers, some suggest that special intelligence between “law enforcement, financial institutions, and regulators around the world” is the only way. Through such agency cooperation, some popular dark web marketplaces like Wall Street Market(WSM) were shut down. Acknowledging these results, perhaps it is the best solution available.
Due to the effectiveness of special intelligence and its ability to track down otherwise hidden sites like WSM and dozens other, it is demonstrated that this method works. From my perspective, because of the existing complexity of the dark web and its hidden servers, only through intelligence agencies and intelligence gathering will marketplace sites be shut down. Therefore, it is important to keep backing these programs. This would prevent hackers from having a platform to sell data on, thus making it less important to them. Most importantly, fewer marketplaces would reduce the chances of the data being sold since there would be less exposure. Hence, for the millions of people who are already victims of breaches and the millions more to be, for them to know that their data is hard to sell would be a huge sigh of relief. The longer the data sits, the more time individuals would have to change their credentials and render the stolen data useless.
Data Breaches 