The threat of data breaches can loom over every digital interaction. As businesses and individuals increasingly rely on digital platforms, the risk of personal and sensitive information falling into the wrong hands has escalated. This has given rise to the critical practice of breached identity tracking – a tool now essential for safeguarding personal and organizational data.
Breached Identity Tracking: An Overview
What is breached identity tracking?
Breached identity tracking is the process of monitoring and managing compromised personal data across different platforms. This involves identifying data that has been exposed due to security incidents, breaches, or unauthorized access, and taking steps to mitigate any potential damage or misuse of this data.
What are the key components of breached identity tracking?
- Data monitoring: This involves continuous scanning of the dark and clear web, forums where criminals gather, and other platforms where stolen data is often shared or sold. By doing so, organizations can be alerted immediately when their information is found.
- Alerts: Effective breached identity tracking tools provide real-time alerts when a breach is detected. This enables your team to react fast, protecting the affected identities and limiting potential damage.
- Remediation: Once a breach is identified, remediation services guide businesses through the steps necessary to secure their data, such as changing passwords or implementing stronger security measures.
- Comprehensive reporting: Generating detailed reports about the nature of the breach, the type of data compromised, and potential risks helps in devising future preventive strategies and understanding the impact of the breach.
How can your organization implement breached identity tracking?
- Choose the right tool: Several software solutions on the market offer breached identity tracking functionalities. Select a service that fits the specific needs of your organization and industry.
- Educate your users: Understanding how to respond to alerts and reports is crucial. Investing in training can help staff effectively manage breaches.
- Regular updates: Ensure that your systems and tracking tools are kept up-to-date to counter new threats and adapt as cybercriminals evolve their tactics.
- Create response plans: Have a clear, actionable plan for what to do when a breach occurs, including communication protocols, data recovery steps, and legal considerations.
Why is it Important to Track Breached Identities?
Why is monitoring stolen credentials important in today’s cybersecurity landscape?
Stolen identities are often the first step in a cyberattack; more than 60% of data breaches begin with stolen credentials as the initial access vector. Even if the credentials are from a user account with no access privileges, a talented hacker can use that stolen information to launch a sophisticated attack that moves them deeper into your system and jeopardizes sensitive information.
Especially with stealer logs, which can contain more than saved passwords: including active cookies, cryptocurrency wallet logins, and other information saved to browsers, threat actors can be equipped with more to launch attacks.
What’s the impact of a data breach caused by a breached identity?
The average cost of a data breach is $4.9 million, including the cost of finding and remediating the breach, interruptions of operations, legal fees and other fines. There is good news, however. Organizations that use AI and automated solutions for security are able to reduce the average cost of a data breach by more than $2 million.
How do attackers steal identifying information?
Threat actors use many tactics to steal your credentials. Below are some of their most common attack vectors:
- Phishing: Tricking individuals into providing their login information by using fraudulent emails, messages, or websites that mimic legitimate ones. Victims are often lured into entering their credentials into fake login pages.
- Malware: The use of malicious software, such as keyloggers, spyware, and trojans, to capture login credentials as they are typed on a keyboard or stored on a device. This malware can be delivered through infected email attachments, downloads, or compromised websites.
- Brute force attacks: Using automated tools to guess passwords by systematically trying different combinations until the correct one is found. Weak and reused passwords are particularly vulnerable to this type of attack.
- Credential stuffing: Using lists of previously leaked usernames and passwords from other data breaches to try and gain access to accounts. Since many people reuse passwords across different services, this method can be highly effective.
- Social engineering: Criminals manipulate individuals into revealing their login credentials by exploiting human psychology. This can include impersonating a trusted entity or authority figure, creating a sense of urgency, or exploiting a person’s helpful nature.
- Man-in-the-Middle Attacks (MitM): Intercepting communication between a user and a legitimate service to capture login credentials. This can occur over insecure networks, such as public Wi-Fi, where attackers can eavesdrop on data being transmitted.
- Exploiting vulnerabilities: Cybercriminals exploit security vulnerabilities in software, applications, or websites to gain unauthorized access to user databases containing login credentials.
- Data breaches: Attackers target and breach organizations’ databases to steal large volumes of credentials. These stolen credentials are often sold or shared on the dark web.
How Flare Helps with Breached Identity Tracking
How can Flare help your team monitor breached identities?
When a criminal steals credentials, your team may not find out until your system suffers a breach. Flare helps you find those stolen credentials early, by automating the process of continuously scanning the clear & dark web, as well as illicit threat actor communities. Flare’s threat exposure management (TEM) platform sends your team alerts when it detects your organization’s name, employees’ names, domains, IP, and any other key information so your team can find stolen or leaked passwords and usernames when they appear in places they shouldn’t be.
What do you get with Flare’s global threat intelligence solution?
- Automated continuous monitoring: Using an automated solution gives you 24/7 coverage, so you will know as soon as there’s a threat.
- Relevant notifications: Flare cuts through the noise, sending you alerts when it detects your organization’s name, employees’ names, domains, IP, or any other key data.
- Proactive cybersecurity: Security can be reactive, but by scanning for potential threats, you can catch breaches early and take steps to protect your data, systems, and networks.
- Translation and contextualization: FlareAI Assist seamlessly translates Russian, Arabic, Spanish, French, and other threat actor forum posts into seamless English summaries that provide rich context for your team.
Why do security teams use Flare to search for stolen credentials?
It’s daunting to search for stolen credentials manually; more than 24 billion stolen credentials are circulating on the Dark Web. Unless you know where to look, finding your own organization’s leaked credentials is nearly impossible. Flare’s platform scans automatically and constantly, sending notifications to your team when your data has been exposed.
Tracking Breached Identities and Flare
The Flare Threat Exposure Management (TEM) solution empowers organizations to proactively detect, prioritize, and mitigate the types of exposures commonly exploited by threat actors. Our platform automatically scans the clear & dark web and prominent threat actor communities 24/7 to discover unknown events, prioritize risks, and deliver actionable intelligence you can use instantly to improve security. Track down stolen information with Flare.
Flare integrates into your security program in 30 minutes and often replaces several SaaS and open source tools. Learn more by signing up for our free trial.
