When Yahoo announced recently that information for 500 million accounts had been stolen in 2014, the many wondered if it was possible for the company to not know about it until recently. It might surprise you to learn that 85% of data breaches are discovered by an external third party and not by the company that was hacked. According to the 2016 Cost of Data Breach Global Report, the average time to identify attacks from malicious or criminal sources was 229 days. One organization surveyed for the report didn’t discover they had been breached for 569 days. When a company finally learns they’ve been hacked, they need to contain the security threat, assess the damage, begin the remediation process, and notify anyone who might have had sensitive data exposed. The longer a breach goes undetected, the greater risk to the organization.
Finding stolen data on the Internet quickly and securely is critical. A Baltimore-based startup says it has developed a way to find that data using something called data fingerprinting. Matchlight creates hashes of an organization’s data in fragments as small as 14 bytes. Using their massive private index of the Dark and Deep Web, Matchlight compares the data fingerprint hashes collected with the Dark Web data, searching for an element of the data without actually knowing what the data is. The company also monitors some mainstream sites at 30-second intervals such as Reddit, Pastebin and Twitter, which are also used by hackers. If Matchlight finds something similar , it scores it on how similar it is to the company’s data it is searching for. The application also has a Private Search feature where users can conduct real-time queries on it’s index of the Dark Web, keeping their search queries secret from anyone, including Matchlight.
Matchlights data hashing and comparing is done in real time, which can shorten the breach discovery time from months down to minutes. In the first 24 hours after Matchlight was first enabled, it found 20,000 to 30,000 credit card numbers and 600 leaked email addresses and passwords.
Matchlight offers monitoring of up to five Personal Information records for free. Paid subcriptions of $5 per record per month have access to monitoring of all types of data and two default data fees. Subscription plans of $3000 per month or more include Matchlight’s Private Search.
For more information on solutions for running your businesses’ technology more efficiently, visit our website or contact Megan Meisner at mmeisner@launchpadonline.com or 813 448-7100 x210.
