How to find out if my information is on the dark web?

The dark web is the hidden internet residing under the surface web.

Today we’re talking about data, private data, your customer information, your private information that is what we have to worry about being on the dark web.

In reality, there are a group of people on the dark web who gather data, private details, social security numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, anything like that and they put it out there for auction. And the idea to sell it off like it’s nothing but a simple commodity.

If you signed up, for say an AOL account, a yahoo account, a Hotmail account, all of these email domains have been compromised at some point within the last six years.

Real world example :

Recently a friend of ours got a text from uber saying her uber verification code was 1234. The reason why this was concerning is that she has not used her uber for many months.

But when we checked her recent rides, we saw that someone in the city was using her uber account to go back and forth. We know it wasn’t her because she wasn’t in the city at that time.

The reason why this happens, we checked her email on the dark web and we saw that her email was compromised through several breaches.

So what that means is someone hacked into Yahoo, got all of the user information of emails, plaintext passwords and they took it. Then they put it on the dark web.

Either they tried to use that information themselves. Most of the time, the hackers will have a computer script that will attempt your email, password combination through a bunch of websites such as social media, banking websites. And once they get a hit, they will go in themselves and see what they can do. If they can take out any money.

If they don’t get any hits is just dump it out on the dark web for free. And basically, it’s kind of like a code of ethics between hackers. If they release it and anyone else gets a hit and then the hacker that got the hit would you know give the original hacker some sort of compensation.

Tools to check whether your information is on the dark web?

Not always our emails compromised through the email domains themselves. Sometimes it’s when you sign up for a website using that email website such as MySpace, MyFitnessPal, Capital One, and Equifax that have all been hit within the last five years.

So if you had an email and a password that you used for that site, which you also used for some important sites like banking, then that is how someone can get into your account.

Once your info is on the dark web, to use that email and password combination for anything important then you must get on that and change that password as soon as possible.

So stop and realize what you have out there on the internet, what do you have on social media, what accounts you have, passwords. And what you want to do is that you want to take the proactive step to look for it, and make sure that you safeguard against your private data, in your security.

So we take a look at companies like credit card companies, anybody like that who offers free dark web monitoring. They’re gonna look out there and they’re going to look for your information.

Whether it’s a bank site or uber so how do we monitor the dark web. How do we know that your email has been compromised before it’s too late? We have some dark web monitoring tools. So what it does is it’s a program that scans the dark web for a certain email domain.

If it finds anywhere on the dark web, it’s a hit, it’ll come up, the email, the password that was compromised, if it was compromised, or if it’s encrypted, and then it’ll give us a report.

The report will consist of how it got on the dark web what is out there. We can have alerts as soon as an email is compromised on the dark web.

Anything pertains to you, they’re gonna hunt the web and they’re gonna let you know if they find it out there. That way you could take steps to protect yourself to alert authorities and do what you have to do to make sure that your information is safe.

Another great opportunity is looking for a third-party company that offers dark web scans. These are companies that will go out there and their only function is to scour the dark web.

They’re gonna look for you and they’re gonna check out and keep an eye out for you these are your watchdogs you want to keep in your back pocket.

Tools that works really :

There are also some free services from where you can search your details like email, phone number, social security number from Experian.

Before trying out any free dark web monitoring tools, make sure it is a reputable tool before signing up. Some free tools may collect your data like email, phone number and it can open the backdoor for data breaches.

Avast Antivirus offers a free data searching tool from where you can search if any of your email addresses is leaked anywhere.
Link: https://www.avast.com/hackcheck

There is a famous website called haveibeenpwned.com which searches the hacked databases for your credentials. It is the most used tracking site for data breaches.

Let us know in comments if you found this article helped you.