Dark Web Crawling for Cybersecurity: Insights into Vulnerabilities and Ransomware Discussions

Security professionals recognize the importance dark web to proactive and reactive security measures. The dark web data is considered a potential source for cyber-attack investigation. In the present work, the authors elaborate on the distinct tone of discussion about vulnerabilities and attacks on the dark and surface web. The authors crawl the surface and dark web for vulnerabilities and ransomware discussions. Authors considered log4j vulnerability, REvil ransomware, and WannaCry ransomware for discussion. The scope of the result is confined to offering evidence from dark web crawling. A dark web crawling mechanism is designed to crawl with entered keywords and harvest the hidden services to create a word-cloud visualization. The future scope of the proposed work is set to develop an analytic engine to investigate each hidden service from the pool of commonly harvested links to gather attack-specific insights.