Cybersecurity Glossary
Dark Web Monitoring
Watching criminal marketplaces and breach dumps for your own credentials and data.
What Dark Web Monitoring means
Monitoring services search breach collections and criminal forums for your domain, your email addresses and sometimes your documents. When something appears, you learn that a credential is circulating or that data from a supplier breach includes yours.
Why Dark Web Monitoring matters for small businesses and nonprofits
It is an early warning rather than a defence. Its value depends entirely on what you do within the hour of an alert, which should be forcing a password reset and checking for existing account misuse.
What to do about Dark Web Monitoring
- Monitor your own domain rather than only individual addresses
- Decide in advance what happens on an alert, so the response is immediate
- Treat any hit as evidence that the password is already being tried elsewhere
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