If you’re anxious about your personal information circulating the depths of the dark web, fear no more – or at least a little less. Terbium Labs announced on Tuesday that Matchlight, an intelligence system that stalks the dark web for stolen information on the user’s behalf, is now available to the general public.
“Matchlight keeps an eye on your data so you don’t have to,” states their site. To use it, all you need to do is sign up on the website and then input some of your details. If there is a detection by Matchlight, an alert is sent to you.
When users sign up, their first five pieces of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) are monitored for free by the company. After that, a paid subscription provides access to all of Matchlight's features. For business owners, each piece of data costs $5 to monitor.
The alert service includes account credentials, social security numbers, and confidential documents. Users can also monitor keywords or patterns, a useful tool for tracking email addresses, credit cards, and identification numbers.
Typically, it takes 206 days before a data breach is identified, with 85 percent of these breaches discovered by an external third party. Matchlight claims to reduce this to just minutes.
While providing such personal information may seem risky, Matchlight says this information is not actually stored in its original form. Instead, a “fingerprint” of the data is made via a hashing algorithm.
“Fingerprinting allows Matchlight to search the dark web for client information without needing to reveal that information to anyone, not even to us,” claims their website.
Matchlight launched last year, but only as a private beta that was unavailable to the public. It is now targeting single users and small-to-midsized businesses that don’t have the money or manpower of larger corporations.
"Attacks are inevitable and organizational data and intellectual property are always at risk," said Tyler Carbone, COO of Terbium Labs, in a statement. “We're shifting the balance of power by providing organizations of all sizes with the tools to identify and rapidly counter information theft and fraud quickly, privately and affordably.”
