Surface Web, Dark Web, and Social Media
By Mike Betron, Infoglide Software Director of Marketing
A recent article in Bank Systems & Technology says that financial services institutions are discovering increasingly sophisticated attempts to defraud their customers – more sophisticated in how they gather information and employ it in their criminal schemes. “As fraudsters increasingly seek to exploit weaknesses in consumers’ defenses through social engineering schemes rather than hack vulnerabilities in banks’ security systems, the need for enterprisewide solutions to detect fraud across channels is greater than ever.”
The sources of information about individual consumers are rapidly growing and increasingly accessible. Most of us concerned about our personal information think first about that portion of the World Wide Web that is indexable by conventional search engines, sometimes called the “surface web.” That information is more easily monitored and managed than social media sites (e.g. Facebook) and other dark web sources such as local, state, and government databases.
What is needed is a comprehensive picture of our personal online reputation, but it’s not a simple task. It requires the ability to tie together diverse data from a multitude of sources in a variety of formats. Using similarity searching, advanced filtering, and sophisticated scoring, federated searching across disparate data sources can produce a unified view of an individual’s “identity” for ongoing monitoring. Ideally, that unified identity can be refreshed using automated rather than manual processes.
Identity resolution offers the ideal core technology for any solution designed to present a unified picture of personal identity across surface web, dark web, and social media sources. Since identity resolution engines are designed to incorporate new data sources without requiring system rewrites, they offer the best hope for deployment of extensible systems for online identity management.
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