General Motors is one of the world’s top automotive manufacturers, having sold over 10 million vehicles worldwide. GM is headquartered in Detroit, Michigan and is known for brands like GMC, Buick, Chevrolet and Cadillac.

The dark web is a place where people are able to share confidential information with low risk of being recognized. GM is committed to the security of their data, products and employees, and is aware that unauthorized parties may find methods of acquiring private GM assets.

Our Automotive Specific Dark Web Threat Intelligence system provides a method of identifying and analyzing unusual activity by crawling through suspicious websites on the dark web and scraping the information for further investigation.

The Dark Web Threat Intelligence app is scheduled on a server to run at specific intervals. As it runs, it references a specified list of websites to scan for confidential GM information. When information is found, it takes a screenshot of that page and scrapes the text for analysis by the GM security team.

The information from dark web sites is stored in our database where it is referenced for ranking. The application compares scraped information to a set of terms and assigns the URL a threat level based on its contents. GM IP addresses and employee credentials are given high threat levels, whereas mentioning the GM name or brands yields a low threat level.

The GM security team uses this information to identify information leaks and threats to company security.

Our Dark Web Threat Intelligence app uses AWS to host our web app, the database, and run the scraping algorithm. The scraper is run using Python scripts and the scraped information is stored in a MySQL database. Our web app uses React to display the database information and update the data when needed.