Zero Trust World 2023: A Deep Dive Into the Dark Web, ThreatLocker Gold Partner Awards

THREATLOCKER ZERO TRUST WORLD — A Zero Trust World 2023 keynote this week focused on how the dark web is essentially the Amazon of stolen data, and products and services easily accessible to anyone who wants to commit cyber crime.

Collin Ellis (pictured above), solutions engineer at ThreatLocker, gave the disturbing keynote on the dark web. Zero Trust World 2023 in Orlandofocused on zero trust security and how it can stop hackers from launching successful attacks that can result from stolen data.

Danny Jenkins, ThreatLocker’s CEO, closed out the conference by saying he’s taking with him feedback he’s received to keep improving.

ThreatLocker’s Danny Jenkins

“These tools are going to help you get more secure in your environment,” he said. “We’re here to take more steps forward in zero trust.”

The Flipside of Legitimate Social Media, Marketplaces

Ellis described how easy it is to access everything you need on the dark web for malicious hacking.

“As typical people, typical consumers, we think about how we use the internet, social media, the marketplaces that we shop at Amazon and so on,” he said. “And the dark web is a direct reflection of that in an almost malicious sense. They’re polar opposites, but they define the same type of sale, the same type of transaction. But the items, the the services, the people, the information you get to interact with is something that no one really knows about.”

Think about how easy it is, as an example, to go to Amazon and buy a charger cord, Ellis said. On the dark web, you can do the exact same thing and buy absolutely anything. That includes hacked passwords, hacked accounts, ransomware and malware for dollars.

“Bitcoin is what fuels it,” he said. “A lot of the cryptocurrency fuels that exchange. But it’s so simple and it takes minutes for someone to get access, connect to the dark web, make that transaction and then now doing anything maliciously that they see fit.”

More Gravitating to the Dark Web

The number of cybercriminals making use of what’s available on the dark web is growing, Ellis said.

“An example is Clop as a ransomware gang,” he said. “They don’t put up a paywall in the information that they’ve taken. It’s more of a flex to say, ‘We compromised this company; this is all of their information because they don’t care about their security.’ So what it allows the run-of-the-mill criminal to do without spending too many dollars and using their own resources is now they have all of your information to go ahead, take out new credit cards, new loans under your name and just leverage that as they see fit. So I like to describe it as …