Overview
Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) can have difficulty monitoring the dark web for their clients. Marketplaces routinely go down or change locations, and the addition of Telegram and unconventional illicit markets like Genesis market has made it even more difficult to effectively monitor thousands of sources for cyber risk.
This success story highlights how Flare’s dark web coverage slashed a leading North American MSSP’s dark web monitoring costs, leading to greater increased efficiency and more revenue from expanding their service offering.
With a Digital Footprint Monitoring platform like Flare, organizations can automate their dark web & illicit community monitoring to expand the bandwidth of their team and create more revenue opportunities.
The Challenges
The Dark Web is Too Vast and Quickly Changing to Monitor Well
Most managed security service providers (MSSP) are looking for ways to expand the variety of services that they can offer to their clients. One potential service that MSSPs can provide is the ability to monitor the dark web and other illicit communities. However, MSSPs face two main challenges.
- Dark Web Monitoring Requires Additional Knowledge
Not all MSSP’s have security operations staff with the experience to effectively implement a dark web monitoring solution. Implementing a specialized solution can require hiring expensive new employees and purchasing a six-figure tool. In many cases tools can take weeks to train a new hire and onboard new specialized tooling to effectively provide monitoring for dozens of clients.
- Manual Dark Web Monitoring Takes Time
MSSP employees who have dark web monitoring experience face the time required to monitor the dark web as an additional challenge. It takes an extended period to manually create accounts (that often get banned), pay fees in Bitcoin to access some sites and use deprecated search bars in other sites. Additionally, various other hurdles make the economics of offering this service to customers hard to justify.
Flare’s dark web monitoring approach consists of three components that ensure that our data is accurate and up to date:
- The research and threat hunting team follow trends and news on upcoming illicit websites
- The technical team adds new data sources to our collection engine
- The automated collection engine crawls every source every day, saving the results in our local databases, and archives dark web posts and platforms
Customers can take advantage of our 3 factor approach and easily query any data that they require.
How Flare Helped
A leading MSSP that covers Europe and North America reduced their dark web investigation time by 97.3% and increased the areas of the dark web they covered.
A Senior Security Specialist stated, “What used to take about 1500 hours to complete can now be done in 1 week.”
Within a few days of using Flare, a Senior Penetration Tester uncovered high fidelity and actionable findings on behalf of a client and realized the value the dark web monitoring platform could bring to his company. Previously, this customer had tried competing products for 6 months that included too much noise to effectively take action.
In addition, Flare’s intuitive platform allowed the Senior Penetration Tester to delegate the initial dark web data discovery to junior team members with little to no experience with the dark web. With more people supporting dark web investigation assignments, the Senior Penetration Tester could offer dark web assessments and monitoring to a greater number of their customers, generating more revenue for the firm.
“Flare allows me to empower junior analysts to do dark web investigations that were previously impossible, hence liberating bandwidth,” shared Senior Security Specialist, North American MSSP.
Want to increase dark web monitoring capabilities, junior team members skillbuilding, and revenue? Book a demo to learn how we can add more bandwidth to your team with our 3 pronged dark web coverage.
