The Dark Web and Underground Markets

“Life in the SOC” is a Blog Series that shares experiences of the BlueVoyant SOC defending against the current and prevalent attacks encountered by our clients. The blogs discuss successful detection, response and mitigation actions that can improve your defensive capabilities.

BlueVoyant’s research and monitoring of dark web and underground markets revealed some notable findings during the month of August. Conversations of interest to the finance sector demonstrated that forums of this sort frequently rise and fall in popularity. Between July and August of 2019, BlueVoyant observed massive swings in some of the top forums with finance-related conversations. The August graph (below), based on overall percentage, identifies the top dark web forums and underground markets discussing targets in the financial sector.

Interestingly, in the discussions of financial targets, BlueVoyant saw PayPal knocked out of the top spot during the month of August. BINs took the top spot, followed by Card Verification Values (CVV). PayPal came in at number 3 with 15% of the tracked conversations. At this time, the reason is unknown. The graph below represents the top targets of discussions related to financial interests, followed by a graph displaying the trends from July to August.