Data breaches have become commonplace in our current era of privacy invasions, and having our data exposed on the dark web is a serious possibility. Your information being blasted is scary no matter where it is, but if you’re not someone browsing the dark web, how would you know if your information got leaked? Ideally, companies will alert you if there’s been a breach, but that’s not always the case, especially if the company doesn’t even know it’s been hacked.
If you have any reason to believe that your sensitive data has been leaked, you should know how to find out what it is and how to deal with it.
Finding your data on the dark web
Don’t start surfing the dark web yourself. The last thing you need is to infect your system with malware that’ll expose more of your data to malicious actors. There are a couple services you can use that’ll scan for your data across marketplaces and forums.
Both Aura and Experian are trusted services that offer a free dark web scan. If they find nothing, you’re likely free and clear. However, if something pops up, you should act immediately.
Can you remove data from the dark web?
No, unfortunately there’s no way to delete your data from the dark web, and I wouldn’t trust any service that claims to do so. What you need to do now is identify the exposed data and defuse the threat.
One of the most common data breaches involve emails and passwords. Obviously, you need to change your passwords, but you also should activate two-factor authentication (2FA) or multifactor authentication (MFA) on all your accounts. Yes, all of them, not just the affected ones. Using unique passwords for every account is also important so you can isolate threats — this can be made more convenient with a password manager.
If your banking or credit card credentials got leaked, you need to contact your financial institutions and place freezes or fraud alerts on your accounts. If your social security number got leaked, you’ll need to freeze your credit. Go to Equifax Credit, Experian Credit, and TransUnion Credit to do that. While the service is free and you can lift the freeze whenever you want, you should keep it frozen and only temporarily lift it when you need to apply for new credit.
Still, once all your information is out in the open, someone can use that data to impersonate you. Potential victims of identity theft should file a report with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on IdentityTheft.gov. While it’s unlikely to be able to change your Social security number, it can be done in extreme cases.
Bottom line
Again, once your data has been exposed, there’s no removing it from the dark web. And it’s possible that another breach of your data could find itself there, so you might want to use a continuous dark web monitoring service. Experian is one of the free ones, although it does have paid tiers.
As far as prevention goes, there’s not much you can do to stop your data from being leaked into the wild, but there are steps you should take to reduce the potential damage to your life, namely maintaining unique passwords for your accounts and activating 2FA or MFA.
The most important takeaway here is not to dawdle. Take the measures to protect yourself and monitor your accounts going forward. You could be exposed to something as simple as spam emails, which you should be able to suss out, but there are worse things than spam.
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