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Forensic Pathways have developed their own in-house ‘dark web crawler’ for monitoring the dark web for potential data breaches and/or threats. The software has been built to refine and enhance your threat intelligence and risk management process. By incorporating the dark web monitoring into your processes you increase your visibility of the dark web and reduce the risk of exposure to your company, your data and your reputation.

The dark web lives up to its name, creating a platform that allows users to operate on the web whilst remaining in the shadows and avoiding detection from law enforcement. A community of cyber criminals now thrives on the dark web due to the levels of anonymity and lack of traceability reducing risks for criminals, who have created a community of advertising, discussing, buying and selling of illicit goods and personal information.

From guns to guides, stolen data to sensitive, confidential information, there is a market and a marketplace for everything; you can find a buyer and seller for almost anything illicit. This can create a crisis for businesses.

There are established marketplaces operating much like eBay, where sellers advertise what they have for sale, allowing buyers to review the offering and the sellers, all of whom are graded and ranked, helping other potential buyers to identify ‘legit’ sellers.

Figure 1 An example of an advert for a banking template found on a popular dark web marketplace. Identity of exploited company protected due to being a house hold name

Figure 2 An example of the review and ranking system of vendors

There are forums dedicated to discussing, sharing and selling valuable and exploitable information, from identified network frailties to stolen company data.

Unlike the ‘open web’ (the internet we use daily), the dark web is not indexed. This means that it can be very difficult to search for and detect specific information. However, as this labyrinth of information and intelligence cannot be neglected, Forensic Pathways opted to deliver a solution that could revolutionize how we identify and process intelligence found on the dark web.

Drawing on over 10 years of due diligence and open source intelligence experience, the company recognized that replicating services and techniques utilized in open web due on the dark web would create new opportunity for the company and its clients.

After conducting rigorous analysis on consumer needs, market trends and competitor offerings, Forensic Pathways have launched a new dark web monitoring and investigations solution that will significantly increase the scope and visibility of intelligence, offering clients a more robust, thorough and proactive solution to brand reputation and threat intelligence.
Forensic Pathways have developed our own in-house crawler, capable of crawling, harvesting and storing data that is searchable through a secure, password protected search engine. This allows users to not only draw on historic findings and locate possible threats, it also allows users to create an alerting system that will identify specific search terms and key words. Furthermore, our crawler is not restricted. There is no ‘focus crawl’ – we feel that vital information could be hidden away in the cracks and crevasses of the dark web, and so we have developed a solution that will blanket search multiple platforms within the dark web, ensuring investigations cover all angles and provide maximum visibility.

Figure 3 An example of the dark web search engine in use

Figure 4 The above search for ‘bitcoin’ found over 500,000 items in 38 milliseconds

This is just the beginning. Forensic Pathways have a very exciting pipeline and have ambitious aspirations for delivering the most innovative, thorough and robust dark web monitoring and investigation services. The capabilities the company will be adding to the current solution will revolutionise how we use the dark web as part of our threat intelligence and risk management processes.

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Where do fraudsters hunt for data online?

Cifas & Forensic Pathways Ltd 

“With identity fraud levels at an all-time high, the need to look at how criminals gain access to personal data is essential in trying to develop successful preventative measures. This collaborative research presented an exciting opportunity to combine the forensic expertise and investigative techniques of Forensic Pathways with the fraud knowledge of Cifas, together providing insight into how personal data can be pieced together from various online sources to commit identity fraud.”

“The findings are eye-opening. This report not only demonstrates the vulnerabilities of personal data held on surface web platforms, but also highlights the pressing need to monitor these with more vigour, as well as look more closely at the use of software such as application programming interfaces (APIs), which allow for a mass of data to be obtained from these platforms. It also reminds us that although illegal activity occurs on the dark web, it is also prevalent on the surface web, where the selling of personal data through forums and online shops is clearly evident. We welcome further collaboration from all industries and sectors in the fight against identity fraud.”

Deborah Leary OBE, CEO, Forensic Pathways

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The recent SMART award round by Innovate UK has seen success for leading threat intelligence company Forensic Pathways Ltd and its academic partner Aston University (Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics). 

The LEADS-ENGINE (Linguistically Enabled Analytic Dark Search Engine) project funded by Innovate UK will run for 18 months.

The project will develop innovative techniques for the detection and prediction of cybercrime and fraud on the dark web.  The project will build on Forensic Pathways’ technology ‘Dark Search Engine’ (DSE), developed in 2016, and will provide clients with actionable intelligence they can use to significantly enhance their protection measures/systems.   

The UK National Fraud and Cyber Crime Dashboard (NFB) shows that, to date in 2021, organisations have been impacted by 57,304 fraud-related cybercrimes, costing £637.4m. There has been a 64% rise in cyber attacks with the shift to remote/home working (mimecast.com).

While there are multiple dark-web monitoring tools/services, they lack the ability to automatically identify threats based on linguistic and behavioural patterns, which currently requires extensive manual analysis using techniques like Forensic Linguistics.

Forensic Pathways Limited (FPL), a Birmingham (UK) based SME has provided investigation, due diligence, threat intelligence/cyber security services for 21 years. In 2016 FPL developed Dark Search Engine (DSE), an automated crawler/scraper of the Tor .onion browser  in order to provide an additional level of intelligence to companies wishing to monitor the dark web for the illegal sale of assets, bank details, client data and email accounts, for example.  DSE has currently indexed over 55 million URLs, with the database updating every four hours.  Previously IBM have quoted over 280 days before companies are aware of a data breach and the ability to know if data has been stolen within a short time frame significantly impacts on the cost to business.

Ben Leary, Director said “Companies are used to looking to the clear net (regular internet) for information on the businesses or individuals they want to do business with or want to go through M&A, however, the open web is just one half of the picture.  They are also under significant pressure to protect their data and reputations”.

We have teamed with Aston University’s world-leading Forensic Linguistics Institute to enable us to go beyond the monitoring/alerting state-of-the-art by providing actionable intelligence and enabling the rapid identification of new threats, feeding into risk assessment tools and adding to a continually developing database of online fraud strategies and behaviours”.

Dr Emily Chiang of the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics said, “Dark-web crime occurs almost exclusively through language. As such, linguistic methods can help establish important information about individuals and communities engaging in criminal activities”.

This is the third successful Innovate UK award for Forensic Pathways and highlights the significant value in collaboration between business and universities. Both organisations are members of the Greater Birmingham Chamber of Commerce.

In 2020 Forensic Pathways completed an Innovate UK project with Huddersfield University and prior to that with Staffordshire University.

For further information please contact:  ben.leary@forensic-pathways.com or call 0121 232 4662

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Forensic Pathways (FP) has over 19 years’ experience developing forensic software solutions alongside law enforcement agencies. The Company has a diverse client base, has won numerous awards for innovation and holds a number of Patents.  It was also a contributor to the European FP7 ODYSSEY project (ID: 218237, €3.8M), which focussed on the interpretability of ballistics systems across Europe.

Moving, forwards, Forensic Pathways and the University of Huddersfield were awarded a three-year Innovate UK grant funded project to further develop their capability surrounding ballistic identification technologies, software and correlation algorithms. LOQUITUR, FP and the University of Huddersfield (HUD) takes ballistic forensics from a qualitative discipline to a true analytical science. 

The increased use of firearms in criminal and terrorist acts drives the need for development of a innovative ballistics analysis technology which enables efficient and successful prosecution of criminals by providing high quality bullet, cartridge and thus firearm matching capability at an affordable price for the police and security markets. 

A National Institute of Standards and Technology  – NIST (Vorburger et al in.“Topography measurements and applications in ballistics and tool mark identifications Surf Topogr. 2016 Mar;4(1)) expressed the need for a forensic ballistics technology which adopts new open data standards and thus facilitating extreme interoperability.

Three critical requirements by NIST include: 

1. Interoperability of ballistic data and integration into end-user intelligence platforms
2. Improved correlation and statistical rigour in matching of bullets and cartridges to weapons, admissible as evidence in a court of law
3. Investigational speed; generation of “fast-time” evidence-based leads to help identify offenders and illegal guns used in crimes and terrorism

Many existing forensic ballistics technologies are functionally sub-optimal and restrict the exchange of evidence between competitor systems, ultimately delaying and/or preventing the successful prosecution of criminals cross borders. LOQUTUR supports the development of a technology that produces strong evidence admissible in court and facilitate interoperability through open access data standards. 

LOQUITUR Integrates state of the art knowledge and technology to provide novel matching and ranking algorithms, providing error rate reports for bullet and cartridge matches via objective scientific standards.

LOQUITUR comprises of:

• ultra-high speed algorithms for ballistic correlation
• DNA-type probability results
• Using/processing data from any ballistic system and converting image data to an open format for processing using the developed algorithms.

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