While most organisations have invested heavily in perimeter security, endpoint protection, and internal controls, far fewer have clear visibility into what’s already been leaked, lost, or stolen – and is now circulating in underground marketplaces, forums, or breach dumps.
That’s where the real risk lies. Because you don’t have to be breached to be exposed.
Despite its reputation, the dark web is not inherently malicious. It’s simply a part of the internet that requires specific tools (such as the Tor browser) to access. This design offers a level of anonymity that’s been used, and misused, in many ways.
On the one hand, it’s where we see ransomware operators sharing stolen data, forums discussing new exploits, and credentials being trafed. But it’s also been used by whistleblowers exposing corruption, activists operating in authoritarian regimes, and journalists working to protect sources.
In short, the dark web is a tool, and like any tool, it can be used for good or harm. From a business perspective, what matters is whether your organisation’s data or reputation is being compromised there, and what you can do to respond.
There’s a common misconception that dark web exposure only follows a direct attack. In reality, organisations often appear on the Dark Web without ever being directly targeted.
It could be a third-party supplier who’s breached, exposing your employee data or a staff member who reused their work credentials on a personal account that was compromised.
The exposure may not even be malicious in origin, but once it’s out there, it can quickly become a risk. But in each of these cases, your organisation’s risk posture changes: without visibility into the dark web, you’re the last to know.
For many CIOs, the dark web remains abstract – something “out there” rather than part of day-to-day risk management. But in practice, the kinds of data and activity found on the dark web are highly relevant to enterprise security.
Here’s what’s commonly discovered during Roc’s Dark Web Exposure assessments:
In most cases, it’s not the presence of your data that’s most dangerous: it’s the fact that you don’t know it’s there so can’t act until it’s too late.
As cyber threats evolve, the perimeter has become porous. Threat actors increasingly rely on reconnaissance – not just zero-day exploits – to find a way in. Data found on the Dark Web often provides the clues they need: login credentials, target lists, network documentation, insider chatter.
For senior technology leaders, this is a visibility problem. If exposure is happening outside your monitored environment, you won’t catch it through traditional security tools alone.
Understanding your organisation’s dark web footprint is not about paranoia – it’s about perspective. It’s about being able to answer the question: “If our data were exposed today, would we even know?”
Head of Security Services
Not all change is progress.
Over the past 18 months, parts of the IT industry have been quietly rewriting the commercial rulebook. Several major vendors have shifted from perpetual licences to multi-year subscriptions, often accompanied by steep price rises and rigid terms.
The Procurement Act 2023 marks a fundamental shift in UK public procurement, replacing broad principles with a new regime of prescriptive transparency. For contracting authorities managing parts of the UK’s £385 billion annual public spend, this legislation introduces a series of legally mandated, data-intensive reporting obligations.
From NHS ransomware attacks to the Royal Mail being frozen out of global operations, cyber threats are no longer theoretical – they’re national disruptions. As attacks grow more targeted, stealthy, and sophisticated, the UK Government is taking a bold step to plug the legislative gaps and put resilience on the boardroom agenda.
It may come as a surprise, but most cyberattacks don’t happen at 10 am on a Tuesday.
More often, they happen when your teams are offline: when your SOC is running on minimal staffing, when an alert gets buried under hundreds of others.
AI adoption in IT is not uniform. The most advanced tools often require significant investment in licensing, infrastructure and integration. As a result, access to AI capabilities is often dictated by budget, not just technical readiness and expertise.
If your data is exposed on the dark web, but you don’t know about it – can you still be held accountable?
Like many industries and sectors, AI and automation are already changing the structure of IT teams. Routine operational work that used to be handled by junior engineers is increasingly carried out by intelligent systems. That work hasn’t disappeared, it’s just being done without human involvement.
The cyber threat landscape has shifted. Fast.
That means the traditional SOC, reliant on manual triage and static rule sets, is falling behind.
Enter the AI-powered SOC. Not just a nice-to-have, instead a necessary evolution in how we approach cyber defence.
Most organisations expect attacks to come from the outside: a malicious payload, a phishing email, a brute-force attempt at the firewall. But in many cases, the foundations of those attacks were laid weeks or months earlier – quietly, invisibly – through data already circulating on the dark web.