What exactly is the dark web and why should you care, either personally or as an employee of URAC? 

Let’s start with the term "deep web," a domain that includes the dark web and all the illicit activity associated with it. Simply put, the deep web refers to any web page, site or server that normal search engines browsers cannot find. Use of the deep web has no illegal connotations, rather banking and government sites use the deep web. When developing a new web site, the unpublished, under construction copy is living on the deep web.

In contrast dark web sites exist on encrypted networks, requiring specialized browsers to locate and interact. Such browsers, while freely available not only encrypt traffic between dark web sites, but hide the location of the user by bouncing the transmission among multiple servers so that the originating address of the user cannot be identified. Dark web sites, with their high level of anonymity, are associated with sale of illegal items such as drugs, guns, or worse.

The dark web is where one can buy email addresses and their open text passwords. Such email addresses and passwords can be purchased to gain access to their associated accounts. To bring this home, I recently attended a demonstration where several URAC email addresses and unencrypted passwords were displayed. That doesn’t mean that URAC network passwords have been compromised (probably). It does mean that an account where someone has registered with a URAC email address has been hacked, uncovering the associated password of the account. 

For example, I have a personal and a professional twitter account. The professional account uses my URAC address. Should Twitter be compromised, my account and email may become available to others. If I used the same password for the Twitter account as I use for my URAC network access, that information could be used to hack into the URAC network. On a personal level, sharing passwords for your personal email between accounts might allow access to your bank or credit card records.

Using multiple passwords is extremely painful. Changing them frequently and creating more complex passwords is excruciating. Tools exist for saving and storage, if needed. Unfortunately, in our current world with its massive and ever-increasing use of technology, a higher level of diligence is required.