This article was updated on September 2, 2025 with updated information
Dark web scraping enables security teams to proactively identify and mitigate cyber risks by extracting valuable information from illicit threat actor communities and cybercriminal forums. By automating the process, organizations improve their security posture so they can more efficiently protect sensitive data and mitigate data breach risks.
Dark Web Scraping: An Overview
What is dark web scraping?
Dark web scraping uses specialized tools called web crawlers to extract data from websites and forums located hidden from traditional search engines, like Google and Bing. These websites and forums use the Tor network, a network that uses various servers to forward and encrypt traffic so that users remain anonymous. While it’s possible to search the web using a dark web browser, doing so manually is time-consuming.
Dark web scraping is typically used for:
- Cyber threat intelligence monitoring: uncovering cyber threats by looking for information about the company being exchanged in cybercriminal forums
- Investigating criminal activity: looking for information about illegal activities, like ransomware and stolen credential sales
What sort of information might dark web scrapers uncover?
Stolen credentials are big business on the deep and dark web, as well as in illicit Telegram groups and on other channels. Often, threat actors use dark web forums to sell and distribute stealer logs, the product of infostealer malware. Infostealers infect browsers, exfiltrating data like passwords, session cookies, and tokens. The resulting logs are sold or distributed on the dark web or illicit communities like Telegram, where they may be used in future attacks.
A threat actor posts stealer logs in bulk in a Telegram channel (these zip files typically contain hundreds of logs)
An analysis of more than 33,000 stealer logs found that many of the compromised devices contained corporate logins and other credentials.
What are the differences between dark web scraping and deep web scraping?
Both dark and deep web scraping provide insights into your security posture, but each reviews different types of internet information:
- Dark web: extracting data from parts of the internet intentionally hidden, typically requiring specialized tools and skills to monitor illegal activities.
- Deep web: accessing unindexed websites and databases not visible through traditional search engines, like subscription-based or gated content
What are tools and technologies for dark web scraping?
Some open-source tools for scraping the dark web include:
- TORBOT: Python-based tool that extracts page titles, site addresses, and brief descriptions
- Dark scrap: tool for locating and extracting downloadable media within Tor websites
- Fresh Onions: tool with Elasticsearch capabilities to uncover hidden services
- Tor Crawl: tool to navigate and extract code from Tor services
- OnionScan: tool to help security analysts identify monitor and track dark web sites
While these tools can extract data, the information they provide often lacks context, requiring security teams to engage in manual analysis.
Why Do You Need Dark Web Scraping in Today’s Cybersecurity Landscape?
Is it still worth it to scrape the dark web?
Over the past few years, Telegram has emerged as a new dark web frontier, with new marketplaces springing up in channels and groups. However, it’s still important to scrape the dark web; Telegram hasn’t replaced the dark web markets, it supplements them. The dark web is still a popular choice for criminal activities. As long as the dark web exists, marketplaces and forums will continue to emerge and flourish there. Even if law enforcement removes a site or forum, it’s likely to emerge elsewhere.
What are the benefits of dark web scraping?
In a world where business operations rely on the internet, dark web scraping tools enable security teams to monitor for and respond to data leaks — like stolen passwords and session cookies — by scanning the dark web for sensitive information. For example, credential theft is widespread, and often the first step in attacks. According to the 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), stolen credentials were used in 88% of basic web application breaches in the last year (which in the state of the cybercrime ecosystem, typically means stealer logs).
Some key benefits include:
- Proactive detection: identifying potential data breaches or leaks by monitoring for sensitive data, like source code or user credentials
- Fraud detection: detecting customer or employee personally identifiable information (PII) that malicious actors can use to perpetrate fraud and identity theft
- Data-driven decision making: gaining insights into threat actor targets and cybercriminal activities
What are the challenges of dark web scraping?
While organizations can build proactive rather reactive security programs with dark web scraping, many face challenges to operationalizing these activities. Some key challenges include:
- Specialized tools: Identifying the unlinked URLs for dark web forums and websites can require extensive research and experience with specialized tools.
- Forum protections: Many dark web forums and websites require a password so researchers need to create anonymous accounts to gain access to these resources.
- Hours of operation: Some websites and forums operate with limited hours, making it difficult for teams to scrape them and extract insights consistently.
- Time-consuming: Gaining insights from dark web scraping can be time-consuming, meaning teams either need a member dedicated to the analysis or must engage in ad hoc activities.
- Incompleteness: Threat actors increasingly use technologies outside the traditional dark web, like illicit Telegram channels, that leave organizations with an incomplete picture of risk.
What are best practices for conducting dark web scraping?
To gain meaningful insights from the dark web that enhance an organization’s security posture, some best practices include:
- Automating processes: Finding solutions that automate manual processes as much as possible gives teams the information and insights necessary to focus on other, more critical security activities.
- Adhering to legal and ethical guidelines: Data extracted from the dark web can contain sensitive PII or intellectual property, so organizations should take the appropriate steps to protect it.
- Maintaining anonymity: Security researchers should protect themselves from potential threat actor retaliation and use tools that maintain their anonymity.
- Integrating with cybersecurity tools: To optimize dark web scraping’s value, organizations can integrate this data into its security alerting tools, like security incident and event management (SIEM) platforms.
Using Flare for Dark Web Scraping
How does Flare answer dark web scraping needs?
Flare’s platform automates time-consuming, manual dark web monitoring tasks by providing comprehensive surveillance of:
- The Onion Router (Tor) network, the traditional “dark web” that uses an overlay network to anonymize activity
- Invisible Internet Project (I2P), open-source, decentralized, anonymous network for browsing the dark web
Why is Flare’s automation better than open-source dark web scraping technologies?
Although open-source dark web scraping exists, they often come with hidden expenses, like being time-consuming or requiring specialized skills. Dark web scraping tools typically start by looking at an initial URL then collecting information from all pages under it which can create scalability, processing, storage, and analysis issues.
With Flare’s automation, security teams can rapidly scale and operationalize their dark web scraping and monitoring capabilities.
What are the key benefits of Flare’s dark web scraping solution?
- Decreased investigation times with insights into dark web exposure with the ability to correlate data points from across the clear & dark web.
- Improved decision-making using artificial intelligence (AI) language models that automatically translate, summarize, and contextualize events.
- Empowering security analysts of all experience levels with threat actor analytics that include threat actor post history and tracking across dark web and various threat actor communities.
Dark Web Scraping and Flare
The Flare Threat Exposure Management 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.
Flare integrates into your security program in 30 minutes and often replaces several SaaS and open source tools. See what external threats are exposed for your organization by signing up for our free trial.
