Introduction: Why Real-Time Darkweb Alerts Matter
The darkweb has become an intricate ecosystem, where cybercriminals transfer stolen or hacked data, plug compromised victims into wallets, and organize sophisticated and large-scale ransomware meetings. For organizations of any size, it is not only a risk, it is present and increasing. Credential leaks, insider conversations, and organizational documentation and data that have been uncovered on underground forums, often days, weeks, and sometimes months before exploitation is publicly visible and malicious activity occurs.
Traditional monitoring methods are often just too slow to take action. By the time an analyst has seen a report of a leak by manually searching for a mention, adversaries have almost always already exploited the weakness. Real time intelligence, delivered to organizations via APIs, has become central to success. APIs help security teams automate threat emerging and darkweb threat discovery, directly integrate intelligence alerts into their scope of security tools, respond before an attack occurs, and before damage is done.
Brandefense has constructed a platform for this reality. It offers endless amounts of API intelligence feeds, modules that can be integrated and preconfigured including a constant variety of historical, current and real-time darkweb intelligence. It enhances security teams’ ability to achieve visibility in the darkweb and aggregate activity and immediately require action.
Brandefense Integration Hub
Brandefense is much more than another threat intelligence feed. Instead, it offers an Integration Hub that allows an organization to connect its existing tools with darkweb intelligence. Rather than treating threat feeds as separate databases, Brandefense intelligence is delivered at the place it’s consumed, where analysts are actually working.
The Integration Hub provides support for a broad range of platforms:
- SIEM solutions such as Splunk or LogRhythm to enrich logs in real-time.
- SOAR platforms such as Cortex XSOAR or ArcSight as part of an automated playbook.
- Ticketing and workflow solutions such as Jira to manage cases.
- Communication platforms such as Slack or Microsoft Teams for immediate alerting.
- Cloud monitoring such as AWS GuardDuty to monitor.
This breadth of integrations means an organization doesn’t have to recreate processes to consume threat intelligence. Instead, alerts are enriched and correlated in the same dashboards analysts use daily.
API-Driven Darkweb Intelligence
Attackers employ straightforward techniques to identify Shadow IT. One of the most common techniques is Certificate Transparency (CT) logs. All TLS certificates are logged in public CT logs. Attackers can run At the core of Brandefense is an API-first architecture. The APIs were created to allow for fast, structured, and filterable access to darkweb intelligence data that allows developers, SOC engineers, MSSPs, etc. to embed intelligence into custom workflows.
The API adheres to REST principles and is therefore easy to integrate into whatever application you are working on. Authentication is done using secure access tokens and role-based permissions determine what different users/applications have access to.
The API itself includes some key features:
- Flexible query parameters: filter intelligence by category, country, industry, IOC type, or by time range.
- Structured JSON responses: provide machine-readable results that can be ingested into SIEM dashboards and used in automation pipelines.
- Real-time updates: data sourced from ransomware leaks sites, forums, Telegram channels or any other underground intelligence source.
Real-Life Use Cases for Security Teams
The combination of the Integration Hub and APIs opens several high-value use cases for enterprises, MSSPs, and government SOCs:
Credential Leak Monitoring
APIs may scan darkweb dumps in real-time for any and all mentions of usernames and passwords with links to an organization’s domains. Whenever a dump is detected, alerts are sent directly to SIEMs or ticketing tools for faster remediation
Ransomware Leak Tracking
Ransomware actors are notorious for using leak sites that publish victim data and act as a negotiating tactic to encourage companies to pay. Brandefense’s APIs detect when new postings are made, in real-time, for faster investigation and legal action.
Phishing and Fraud Infrastructure
Brandefense uses monitoring and detection processes of domains, IPs, and hosting patterns as advertised on underground marketplaces to find phishing infrastructures before they are weaponized. When integrated with preprocessing capabilities tagged to SOAR tools, Brandefense can automatically kick off domain takedown processes.
Third-Party and Vendor Risk
Not all threats exist within an organization’s realm. Threats can also exist outside of internal assets; suppliers, contractors and partners. By filtering intelligence by industry or company name, security teams can respond to issues outside their environment, yet across their entire supply chain.
Automating SOC Workflows
Brandefense integrations into Jira, Slack, and critical SIEM platforms mean alerts flow directly into existing workflows already established. This means the amount of manual overhead by security teams analyzing darkweb chatter is significantly reduced, and responding to incidents is faster and more efficient.
Conclusions: The Path to Proactive Defenses with Brandefense
Darkweb intelligence only matters when it is arriving at the right location and at the right time. Brandefense APIs take the raw intelligence provided to transform it into actionable real-time alerts that can be automated seamlessly throughout the security stack.
Brandefense enables organizations to move past reactive monitoring and forward into the realm of proactive defense by providing centrally managed integrations through the Brandefense portal and exposing flexible, secure APIs. Rather than waiting to receive a breach notification from a 3rd party monitoring service, security teams can identify leaked credentials, ransomware exposure, or malicious infrastructure as it occurs and take action before their organization suffers the consequences.
The future of cybersecurity will be driven by automation and integration. With solutions like Brandefense, organizations may finally have real-time darkweb monitoring that is not only possible, but viable, scalable and effective. For any organization that is serious about reducing risk, there is no longer a choice as to whether or not to adopt API-first intelligence; it is imperative.
