The darkish internet has reworked from a clandestine refuge for cybercriminals right into a fully-fledged, refined provide chain for cyberattacks, posing a direct and rising menace to South African organisations.
This hidden section of the web now capabilities as a thriving e-commerce platform the place malicious actors commerce the instruments and knowledge wanted to execute damaging assaults, from ransomware to large-scale knowledge breaches.
This underground economic system is booming, in response to Fortinet’s 2025 Global Threat Landscape Report. In 2024, over 100-billion stolen credential data had been shared in darkish internet boards – a staggering 42% improve from the earlier yr.
This international development has extreme native implications, with the 2025 Interpol Africa Cyber Assessment Report confirming that SA stays a primary goal for financially motivated cybercrime on the continent, a lot of it enabled by assets bought on the darkish internet.
The commercialisation of cybercrime has considerably lowered the barrier to entry for attackers. They now not want superior technical expertise; they’ll merely buy ready-made assets, akin to:
- Stolen credentials and id info: Corporate login particulars are commonly bought, creating a simple entry level for attackers. Globally, compromised credentials stay the commonest assault vector, in response to IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report.
- Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS): At least 4 main RaaS companies are actively marketed, permitting criminals to basically ‘subscribe’ to ransomware instruments. The discovery of 31 new ransomware teams in 2024 highlights the speedy diversification of this menace.
- Corporate community entry: Initial Access Brokers (IABs) promote entry to compromised company networks, paving the way in which for bigger assaults.
The darkish internet is the engine room of the fashionable cyberthreat panorama. Organisations in South Africa should perceive that what occurs on the darkish internet instantly impacts their safety posture. The sale of 1 worker’s credentials or a vulnerability in a third-party provider’s software program can rapidly escalate right into a multi-million-rand breach.
A hidden menace ecosystem
The main danger to organisations stems from the interaction between the seen ‘surface web’ that everybody makes use of each day, and its hidden counterparts: the huge ‘deep web’ (the place protected knowledge like banking portals and company intranets reside) and the extremely nameless ‘dark web’. Credentials stolen from a floor internet utility are incessantly bought on darkish internet marketplaces, which attackers then use to realize unauthorised entry to an organisation’s delicate knowledge saved on the deep internet.
The encrypted and nameless nature of the darkish internet makes it extremely troublesome for safety groups to observe for knowledge leaks or uncovered credentials with out specialised instruments. By the time an organisation discovers its delicate info is on the market, it’s usually too late. A proactive strategy is crucial, involving superior menace intelligence and steady monitoring of those hidden channels to detect threats earlier than they materialise right into a full-blown disaster.
As the darkish internet’s illicit economic system professionalises, the chance to unprepared SA organisations grows in tandem. Building resilience requires each defending inside networks in addition to gaining complete visibility into exterior threats, together with these originating from the darkest corners of the web.