Let’s stop pretending.

While your teams monitor endpoints and apply patches, an entirely different market is booming—one that deals in stolen data. Not tomorrow. Not hypothetically. Right now. And it’s not buried in some impossible-to-reach corner of the internet. It’s organised, accessible, and very much open for business.

This is the dark web. And yes, it’s real. The credentials, internal documents, network diagrams, supplier access tokens, even full VPN configurations—it’s all there, being bought, sold, traded, and leaked. Some of it costs a few dollars. A lot of it is free. All of it is a threat. (I am  calling it the dark web in this article but a lot of this data is found on the surface web hidden behind a login and forums have moved to other channels such as Signal and Telegram Channels.

And here’s the part too many leaders don’t want to hear: it’s not just about your data anymore. It’s about your partners, your vendors, your third-party providers. If they’re compromised, so are you. Their weaknesses become your exposure. Attackers understand this better than most security teams. They don’t always breach the front door. Sometimes, they stroll in through an unguarded side entrance—credentials stolen months ago, never rotated, sitting in a public forum waiting to be used.

Take the case of a supermarket chain. Attackers didn’t breach the network head-on. They used access pretending to be a third-party vendor account, complete with real credentials harvested earlier obtained   from dark web forum. Once inside, they moved fast. Encryption, ransom demand, systems down. And all of it started with one piece of leaked data. The dominoes fell because no one was watching the right place.

That story is not an outlier. It’s a blueprint. Because the modern threat surface doesn’t stop at your firewall. It includes cloud storage links your marketing team forgets to lock down, shared folders from your legal firm, outdated FTP servers at a supplier’s office, and internal documentation floating around because someone uploaded it to a collaboration platform without security controls.

Attackers aren’t guessing anymore. They’re not probing blindly or just using random phishing campaigns. They’re coming with context. They know your team structure, your domain naming patterns, even the tech stack you run. That intelligence isn’t hard to find. It’s out there — served up by data leaks and breaches you're not tracking, pulled from systems someone else forgot to secure.

This is what the real risk looks like now. Not a server rule misconfiguration, but the quiet exposure of your ecosystem. Not a brute force attack, but a patient actor using your own information against you.

The answer isn’t just more tools. It’s not a shinier dashboard or a stricter password policy. It’s a shift in mindset. You have to assume your data—and data tied to your operations—is already circulating.

Risk management today must include the dark web. That means monitoring forums, marketplaces, and breach dumps in real time. It means acting fast when your credentials show up. It means holding third parties accountable and integrating threat intelligence into your incident response process.

Ignoring this threat isn’t passive anymore. It’s negligent. Because this is not theoretical. It’s visible. Quantifiable. And growing every hour. Every time a data dump is published, every time a breach is swept under the rug, the advantage shifts further toward the attackers.

This isn’t just about whether you’ve been breached. It’s about whether you’re willing to face the fact that the breach may already be in motion—and that the evidence is sitting out in the open, in places your team isn’t watching.

The dark web isn’t lurking. It’s listening. It’s reading your documentation. It’s studying your infrastructure. And it’s doing all of that faster than you’re responding.

Thanks to Midlands Cyber member BreachAware for sharing this article. To find out more about who they are and how they help businesses stay ahead of cyber threats, visit BreachAware

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