Immuniweb: How to Know a Domain is on the Dark Web and Its Dangers

The Dark Web has always attracted attention, especially for the number of products, services and other things that can be offered. On many occasions, the limit of what is permitted, legal and moral, is easily crossed. However, this is no longer a secret. Many people are looking for information on how to access the Dark Web and what could be found there. Today in this article we are going to talk about Immuniweb.

Immuniweb is a free and freely accessible web tool that allows us to know what presence a domain has on the Dark Web. If you are responsible for a website that largely handles personal data, this guide will come in handy.

Immuniweb: How to Know a Domain is on the Dark Web and Its Dangers

These times have caused many businesses without an online presence to have one. Or, if they did not give it the importance it deserved, the situation has changed. That online presence in most cases implies that you have a website. In this, you can make purchases and pay directly by credit card, PayPal, etc. Any organization that engages in electronic commerce needs the personal data of its customers.

Unfortunately, the lack of security measures for the storage of users’ personal data causes data breach events to occur. These, in turn, have high chances of going to the dark web . According to a Verizon report regarding data breach events (2020), over 7000 leak events were reported during 2019. This resulted in more than 15 billion records of personal data.

Therefore, 80% of data breach events occurred through hacking, which uses lost or stolen credentials. Cybercriminals are increasingly able to appropriate billions of credentials and require less and less effort.

What is Immuniweb?

It is a free access website to find out about the presence of your organization’s web domain on the Dark Web . It is free and the information you will get is first hand. By means of the latest advances in Artificial Intelligence, specifically Deep Learning , duplicate registrations and many others that are false will be avoided.

Even if you do not own a web domain, you are free to consult the one you want. In a few seconds, you will get this data at a glance:

  • Mentions on the Dark Web (including risk levels)
  • Number of Cybersquatting domains
    • Those who might belong to the organization
    • Those who do not belong to the organization, but use its name
  • Number of Typosquatting domains. Here are some examples:
    • faceboook.com
    • twittger.com
    • gooogkle.com
  • Websites that would be potential sources of Phishing
  • Pages on social networks that appear to correspond to the organization, but which most likely are not

The screenshots you see correspond to a Twitter query (its domain is twitter.com), one of the most widely used social platforms worldwide. In the first instance, essential data such as the IP address of the domain, where the main server is located and who or what company is responsible or owner is displayed. On the other hand, a synthesis of the number of issues found in relation to records on the Dark Web, Cybersquatting, TypoSquatting, Phishing and their presence on other social platforms such as Facebook appears.

Below, we can see in a little more detail the number of mentions and / or records that Twitter has, in this case, on the Dark Web and the number of leaked mentions. It can be seen that Twitter has a very high presence on the Dark Web, with more than 6 million cases.

In turn, that number of leaked records are classified into risk levels from low to critical.

In relation to Cybersquatting , Immuniweb lists the domains that could have been registered by Twitter and those that are not. The latter are especially dangerous because they can have deceptive or malicious purposes, requesting personal data and access credentials.

Typosquatting is as dangerous as Cybersquatting. These are domains that are generated based on frequent typing errors from users. For example, I want to enter redeszone.net but almost always when I am wrong, I write redezone.net . Based on these errors, people can take advantage of it to register a domain and build a website that serves to display ads, products or services for misleading purposes. In other cases, they could be Phishing sites.

The latter would be the most valuable information for the end user. Immuniweb displays an extensive list of websites that were created for Phishing purposes. Also, some of them were created to distribute malware or ransomware, to cite examples. If you are curious or would be interested in analyzing these types of data, you can download a copy of the web pages to have an overview of how they look to the end user.

On the other hand, it is possible to know about the IP address and location of the server that hosts it, the company that allowed the domain registration and its creation date.

An important fact is that if you work in IT or Computer Security, malicious or suspicious domains can be accessed safely. A screenshot viewing alternative is also available. The purpose is to avoid the risk of accessing dangerous resources.

In the event that you need to consume information directly from Immuniweb, it has a completely free access API. To ensure that domain queries get data quickly, it manages to process a request in three minutes. The maximum number of requests is ten in a day, from the same IP address. There is another API that is available and that has a subscription cost that allows you to make requests unlimited per day, without IP restrictions.

We recommend that you access the official website of Immuniweb for more information on how to start using this powerful tool.