Is Your Information on the Dark Web? Here's How to Find Out.

Is your personal information already on the dark web? In this episode, Forrest Garvin explains what the dark web is, how stolen email addresses, passwords, phone numbers, and personal information end up there, and what you can do to protect yourself. You'll learn how data breaches happen, warning signs that your information may have been exposed, and practical steps to improve your privacy and security.

Forrest also shares how to check your own exposure using YourDigitalExposure.com. Use coupon code PRIVACYCK to receive your dark web exposure report and take the first step toward protecting your identity before criminals can take advantage of your information.

Whether you're concerned about identity theft, online privacy, or cybersecurity, this episode will help you better understand your digital footprint and how to reduce your risk.

FREE DARK WEB SEARCH:  YourDigitalExposure.com. Use coupon code PRIVACYCK

FREE WEBINAR:   https://garvinacademy.com/webinar

https://forrestgarvin.com/

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Hey, welcome everyone to the Prepping Academy Podcast. I am Forrest. I mean, sorry if you're disappointed, no Patrick Patrick will be here soon. And but yeah, hope you guys are having a great day. Hope you guys will enjoy this podcast. I'm entitling this one, Your Information is on the dark web. And here's how to find out. So we're gonna look at your information, we're gonna go through the dark web. What does this have to do with prepping and preparedness? Everything. I mean, we try to hide our information. We don't want to get hacked, we don't want our ID to be stolen. It has a lot to do with this. So we we try to be anonymous, and this is one way not to be anonymous with your information in the dark web. So we're gonna go through this, how to find out, all this. I'm gonna you know, you know, go over what's the difference between the dark web and all this stuff. So so anyway, hey, appreciate you listening. Make sure you share, like, subscribe, send money. No, I'm kidding, no money. We do this because we love to do it. So have you ever received the email though? I because I did just this week, just yesterday, that said your password has been found on the dark web. Or if you use a password manager, or it tells you all the time your password or emails on the dark web, and you're like, What? Wait, what? How did that happen? Or maybe someone, maybe your information's on the dark web, or maybe you're getting some spam calls, and you're like, wait a second, how come my spam calls just doubled in the last week? What is going on? Or my spam emails? What does it actually mean? Is someone selling your identity? Is your information out there in you know the world of information? People are selling it. Have you been hacked? Should you panic? You should absolutely panic. No, don't panic. No, not yet. But today I want to share some facts from fiction, just explain what the dark web really is, how information ends up there, and how to find out if you've been exposed, and what of your information has been exposed, and what you should do about it, and should you do something about it? So we're going to discuss all that, and I hope you enjoy. So the reality is everyone wants your information. They can either sell it for money, they can use your information to get money, or to con you, or log into an account and steal your money. But everyone wants your information, and a lot of people are afraid of this term dark web, which I mean, there's reasons to be afraid of the dark web. But let's talk what the dark web is. So the internet has many different layers. Layers sometimes, and a lot of you, a lot of us have never even seen and don't even know about. I'm gonna explain a couple of them layers to you now. One is the email layer, and you're like, Well, I get email. Yeah, you do get email, but is it sent through the internet? You don't really see it going through the internet. It's actually on its own layers, it goes through the internet. And you're like, okay. Well, even when there's FTP, and people are like, Well, I've heard of that, that's file transfer protocol. So you don't see that. Now you can sometimes download a file and you're using a form of FTP, but you don't actually have an FTP client, and you don't practice most people, like 99% of people, actually upload files, download files on a regular basis unless you do it out of a browser. There's you know, there's also you know, layers that banks use that you never see, there's encrypted layers, there's just all kinds of layers to to the internet that you just don't see because most of us live in the world of port 80, which is just rendering web pages, and that and that's it. And so, but there's and we call that well, I call that a lot of people call that, just rendering web pages to a browser. That's kind of what we call the surface web. That's what you see. You see it, you know it, you go to Target, you go to eBay, you go to Amazon. You know what you expect. I mean, you know exactly what you expect it renders up on the screen. You go to Target, they're gonna show you a bullseye and some products, and they're gonna try to sell you. That is what we call the surface web. You see it, you got a device which is called a web browser, and you can actually see what is going on. If you want to, you can usually right-click and actually see the source. What code made this page look pretty organized, showed the graphics, showed my name because I logged into my site. You can actually see that information by usually right-clicking, and you can say view source. And a lot of people already know that. Then there's the deep web. This is information that is not indexed by search engines. So, like, you can't do a search on Mary Smith's bank account. You you're you there's there's no search engine to find that. You can't look up John you know, you know, Thomas, you can't look up his medical records. It's not in a search engine, but it's still on the internet. And the and you know, hospitals are using maybe that surface level. So you don't have a device, you don't have a browser type of thing to go and look at these things. That is what we call, I call the deep web. It's there, there's a ton of information you never get to see, but it's there. If you have the right protocol, you have the right tool, then you can you can see some of this information. Most of the internet actually lives on what I call the deep web. Information you really can't see. So there's a lot of websites out there, tons and tons of websites, but there's so much information that's going through the internet that you just can't visually see, and that's what I call the deep web. Could you see it if you have the right tools? Yes. If you have the right passwords, yes, you could. Then there's a thing called the dark web, and the dark web is just scary because there's monsters in the dark web, kind of really are. Dark web requires a special software, just like the other the other ones. And access is usually hidden. Meaning, when you go to the dark web, you're just not going to bring up your Chrome browser and just start searching the dark web. And there's a lot of things on the dark web that is there and it's dark, and there's no light to expose it. Meaning, there are there are like websites and files and things on the dark web, you just can't find, you can't see, even if you have the right tools and you're using the right protocol, it's hidden. Now, if you have the exact URL to what you're looking for, and you have the right software to see it, you could bring it up. And so imagine there is there are tons of websites on the dark web, there are tons of files, and if you don't have the right tools, the right protocol, the right everything, you just can't see them. And then even though they're there, doesn't mean you can find them. You know, on the surface web, we have Google, it indexes the entire surface web, it's all there for you to see. You can just search anything you want, and boom, it'll show up. Not so much on the dark web. There are very few search engines, and the search engines really are very limited. It like it can't crawl something it can't see, it can't go find something that it can't see. On most of the cases with the surface web, regular websites, they know that Bank of America has a website. They can go go through the entire server and index every single page. Then they can look at all the links and go through them links. Then they can go to, you know, and they can just follow link after link after link and end up literally indexing the entire web for you to search in Google or DuckDuckGo. The dark web doesn't really have that. The dark web has like it's a cul-de-sac. It goes there, it gets, it sees the information, it maybe index it, and it doesn't go anywhere else. It doesn't link to things that people don't want linked. And so that is what we call the dark web. It was like I said, it requires special software and access and it and usually is hidden on purpose. Like any technology, it's it's it has a legitimate use. And and matter, you know, matter of fact, I would say a lot of people still use the dark web legitimately. For example, if you're a journalist and you're wanting to share information back and forth with other journalists, or you're in a communist nation and you're writing papers and or you're wanting to get information out, you don't want anyone to be able to find that. So you just put it on on the dark web. Or let's say that you want to like you know something secret that's going on and you want to expose that, and you want to be a whistleblower because you know, you know, a guy is literally stealing from the military and selling it or something. You don't want to go to a regular website a lot of times and just put that in there because who, you know, who can see that information? A lot of times the FBI, CIA, government agencies literally have websites on the dark web, and they have it there so that people can literally submit you know things about people or like as a whistleblower that can't be exposed or can't be found out by other people. But there's also a lot of stolen information there. I mean, if you if you if if I have your name, username, password, credit card number, phone number, I could literally there's websites I can go and sell that, and then people then can try to use that to harm you. That is, you know, that's a big part of the dark web. So, how does your information get there? Does it just end up there? Does the dark web go and grab it? No, most of it wasn't stolen from you, meaning they didn't come on your computer and say, I got you. I'm gonna take your information and put it on the dark web and sell it. That's not how it really works. It can work like that, but like less than 1%. Most of it is stolen from companies. So let's take the target or LinkedIn data breach. Someone went into their servers, downloaded information, a database of information, and your information was in there. And then they take that and then they try to sell it to other people on the dark web, and people pay for it. People pay to get access to it. In my privacy and security company, Grayman Protection, we have many times paid to get access to databases that we don't have. Why? Because we're looking for people, looking for criminals. One of the things we do for fun is help find people on the most wanted list, uh the U.S. Marshals Most Wanted list. There's large rewards for finding some of these people. And the more information we can get and we can find in some of these leaked databases, it's helpful. So, what informations are there? Well, I mean, what information would people want to buy? Banking information, retail stores that have databases that you've bought, shoes, credit card, email, phone numbers there, airlines, insurance companies, hospitals, credit bureaus, all kinds of leaked data is there. Every time one of these companies suffer a data breach, your information can be exposed. And then you're like, dang, how can how can I stop this? What the heck is going on? So you may have done everything right. You used a good password, used two-factor authentication, and all of a sudden, target gets hacked, and your information boom is gone. Everything right, and your information still can be stolen, hacked, and put on the dark web. And and you're like, what can I do? What how can I stop this? Well, there's no complete one answer that can answer this, but there are some things that we're gonna look at doing to help minimize your exposure. So, what kind of information do people sell? And of course, this is really obvious. Email addresses, username and passwords. I mean, who wouldn't pay from some good usernames and passwords, phone numbers, date of birth, credit card information, social security number. Oh, yeah, all the time this information is leaked or stolen. I can't all the time. Don't think it is rarely ever done. They're trying to put together a puzzle to take over your identity, to get into your accounts, get into your bank account, get in your brokerage account, your retirement account. They need information. So they'll they'll look at a database, see what they can find out about you. They'll do a whole kind of like I don't know if the right word is dossier, but paper about you to get all the information. So when they attempt to breach your real accounts, they're gonna have all the information they have and they or they can get. So, how do you know if your information has been exposed? This is awesome because we can look. There are several services that can tell you that if your information shows up out there, yeah, you can pay money for that. And and there's a marketplace where you can go and put your email address in and information that will search. There's identity protection services and that has dark web monitoring. I'm not a fan of identity protection services, I'm not at all. And in my courses, I teach why, and I'll just kind of sum it up on a high level: just freeze your credit at the four major credit places and they can't steal your identity. Mic drop. Some password managers will alert you that your information is out there. So there's a couple ways you can figure it out. The important thing to understand is that a notification doesn't always mean someone's actively using your information. So if your password manager or your protection service says, hey, we found your email on the dark web, and you're like, oh no, it doesn't really mean it's being used. That means it it just was out there. Now we got to discover what or find out what is what information is out there, and is how harmful is it? What do what steps do I need to do to protect myself? Just because your information has been sound um found doesn't really mean it's being used. Because there's a billions of data points on the dark web. Billions. I mean, it it what's the odds of them using yours? Well, I would if it's out there, let's let's get control over it or let's do something about it. Just don't assume, well, they got five billion people to go through before they get to meet. No, you can't do that. That's not the smart way to handle this. But it is your signal to maybe start taking action to protect your identity, protect your passwords, protect your emails, your phone numbers, all this stuff. So a good thing to do is actually a website that I created, and I created it for you. I literally did. And it is the URL is your digital exposure.com. And you're like, what is this website? What are you trying to sell me? I'm actually gonna give you something for free for being a prepper net listener. Because if you if you can painstakingly listen to me and Patrick on a weekly basis, I need to give you something, and so I'm giving you something free here. Again, that URL is your digitalexposure.com. Your your digitalexposure.com. You go there and it's a clean looking website. It says your email address, scan my exposure. So what you do is you type your email address into the box there. Now you might go, well, if I type my email, then you'll have my email. Seriously, I probably, I mean, I probably already have your email. If I don't, I mean, you're just all you're doing is you're gonna take your you we got to know what to search for. We're gonna take your email and you hit that scan for exposure. And it's gonna take a minute, it's gonna say checking for breaches, searching public profiles, you know, it's gonna do a quick search, it takes about 20 seconds, and then it will pop up, boom, and it will show you a number. If that number is a hundred, that means you're very, very, very high at risk. And and it will tell you high risk. If it's like a 70, it will show you moderate risk. Then to the left of that, it will show you how many data breaches your email has been in on the dark web. It went and looked, and you scroll down and it will show you how many accounts were found, how many searches were your found. Keep going down, and it's and it will it will list a couple of the data breaches that your information was in. And you're like, oh man, I was on these two data breaches, but it's wait, I only see two, but you said I was in six. Then it says four more data breaches are hidden. Well, why are you hiding that from me? Well, I am hiding that from you, but scroll on down, and it says you can fully unlock the exposure and see what of yours was actually exposed, and it says unlock for nine dollars. But you were friends, you're family below the blue. This says pay nine bucks to see your report because I love you, because we're friends, right below that says have a coupon. Click on that because you're not done. We haven't seen anything that except we're high exposed. We haven't seen, you know, we've we saw two of the six. We don't know what it was was exposed in the two of the six, it just to showed us two online databases that we were in. So we're gonna hit that green button that says have a coupon. Here's where it gets pretty good. And type in privacy P-R-I-V-A-C-Y C K. Privacy CK, like it's in one word that's privacy check. Privacy CK. Everybody got that. I will put this down in the notes. Privacy CK. Hit apply. And magically, boom, it actually shows you now for this email address I was testing. It shows six databases that that email was exposed. Then there's a down arrow, and you can click it, and you can see this first one that this email was exposed was a data breach in 2017. 150 million people were in this data breach. It was called B2B USA Businesses. I don't know what that is. I don't know how they got my information. I can't remember. There's a couple here I know that I I've recognized, but it says here my email address, my employers, my job titles, my names, my phone numbers, and my physical address was exposed in that particular one. And you go, oh goodness. Okay, go down to the next one. And that one it says that was on liner spam bot, which I don't even know what the on-liner spam bot is, but it says I can see right now it was Russian because I see some Russian characters from the company. But it says compromise data, email and passwords. Uh-oh. And so you can go down through there and look to see if it's Target, if it's LinkedIn. This one has Cafe Express, which I think is like an order inside of like items with your name on it. And this one was email address, names, passwords, phone numbers, physical address. That's a lot of information. And I'm like, whoa, for this email address, it's not my email address, but hey, I'm just looking in and you're like, wait a second. Okay. Now, here's the bad news, then there's good news. The bad news is we can't go and change this information. You can't go on the dark web. No one can if they tell you they're lying. They're not gonna you can't go on the internet and delete your information in the dark web. Now, if it's in like people search or stuff like that, we can delete that. That's easy stuff. So we need to go and make sure that this Cafe Express, we need to maybe change the email address and our password and information there. We need to go and take care of that. But go and do that. That's your digital exposure.com. Run the search and then go to the bottom. It says code and it's privacy ck. Like check privacy ck. And it's all he's gonna put it in all capital letters, I believe. That's that's perfect. It's fine. Then you can see it. I just gave everyone a nine dollar value that you can go and check the literally dark web. This database is kept up to date, too. Literally, like when you search, it it updates like on a on a daily, uh weekly basis. So it's pretty good and pretty accurate. Okay. So don't panic when you find your stuff, though. That just means we need to take action. Okay. So start it by changing your password. Look at the databases, try to figure out what sites we're using them, but then just go and start changing your passwords. And then also I want you to encourage you that sometimes when you can create a username, use the username as a password as well. I know this is gonna freak some of you out. Some of you may have used your username all your life, first initial, last name. Well, what if you stop doing that? Because if you're gonna use a password manager, you don't really need, you don't know the password, you don't really need to know the username either. So you could literally create a password as your username, a password as your password. That way it has no identifying you know labels to you. If you have to use your email address, then we need to get a burner email address. But but you know, make sure if you can do two-factor authentication. Two-factor is that code, they'll text it to you, email it, or it will come in an app. That is the safest. So imagine if you were in the target data breach where your credit card, expiration, address, zip, username, and password were all exposed back in Target like six years ago. That's all exposed. Someone could have put your username in, they could have put your password in, but they could not access your account because of that real time six-digit number. That is a lifesaver, that is your saving grade. That prevents people from getting, even if they have your username and your password, that real time multi-factor authentication number is real time, like it changes every 30 seconds. Try to put that on all your accounts. So watch for all of a sudden I'm getting a bunch of emails. Why am I getting emails? Maybe you should go do a search. And the cool thing is this remembers you, your digital exposure.com. And and once you do a search, you can come back and really literally do another search, you know, weeks later. Okay, so you can keep doing it. I wouldn't buy a service, I don't like buying services. This, I use this just to to to show people mostly to hey, the the dark web's out there. Your information is probably on the dark web. Maybe you should take your privacy and security a little bit more serious. So after teaching privacy and security for years, I've noticed something. Most people focus on recovery. I focus on prevention, meaning, okay, how can we prevent? If they do steal my target information, let's make sure that my real information is not there. Let's use a burner email. You choose a different email address that doesn't identify that it's me. Let's use a password that's in a password manager and I don't know. Let's use a gift card to buy up so the card, even if it's you know, that information is stolen, it's probably at the time they get it, probably not even usable. Let's use a phone number that doesn't come to my house. Let's get an alternative phone number. That's more on the prevention, and a password manager will help you. My favorite password manager is one password, proton pass. I personally use Bitwarden. I'm so used to it, I'm not going to switch because it's great. It's just not as user-friendly as OnePassword. But they're they're both great, Proton, and I would not use your operating system password. Period. Don't use it. And I would not use your browser. Your browser is one of the easiest things on your computer to hack. Because all you do is use it and go to websites, and they have can have codes in there. And so I would not use your your your password manager with your with your browser or your your I would always use the the great thing about a password manager, you don't even have to know your passwords. And trust me, I've used a password manager for over 10 years. I've never been without a password. Never. Well, what if I'm I'm at my great aunt's house because my little cousin's brother's uncle died? Well, you can get to your password usually always through your phone or through the internet. It's encrypted, highly encrypted, and you can still get access to it. Also use multi-factor authentication. That's sending you the code through text, email, or through the app. The safest is the app. That's the I mean, the safest is what they call a Yuba key, which is a standalone key. You got to plug into the computer, put your thumb on it or your finger on it, it identifies you. But that's listen, that's kind of overkill for most people. I use it for some things, especially my financial, but it's just if that's the answer, people aren't gonna care about their privacy and security. If it comes to an app on the phone, hey, that's easy. You got your phone anyway. Just put this, take the six numbers, put them in. So that's the so the Yuba Keys and 9 being on security level, 10 being the highest, Yubikeys at nine, the the authenticator app is an eight, then texting is probably a seven, and email is a six. Why do I put it in that order? Well, email is the easiest to hack, and then it's probably trying to take over someone's phone, and then getting to the actual app in real time, you gotta actually have their phone, and so that that's why I put it in that order. So go and check that out, yourdigitaleexposure.com, and it's called Privacy Check, just to CK on that. So you need to keep your devices updated, reduce the amount of personal information you share online, use separate email addresses when you can. I mean, they're there the best thing to do is take my digital course, but I know it's pricey, but it's like the master's degree, if not the doctorate degree in privacy. My courses, you can go to garvanacademy.com and check them out. Not trying to sell that to you, but there are no classes outside of I can't think of any classes that is more detailed that covers everything than my classes. I just don't, I can't. I've looked at all the classes, I know the people that teach them all. And mine are just it covers more stuff, more information. You will become an expert, an absolute expert if you take my course. But I know everyone can't take it. Some of you are not smart enough to take. I'm kidding. No, you're smart enough to take it. I just said that to challenge you, but it's it's it's a great course, and I spent a lot of time on it. Privacy isn't one big decision, it is a lifelong kind of process, and you got to start, you know, you start with small habits and and just make them a part of your life over time, and it becomes easier and it becomes fun at some point. I mean, you create aliases and all this. So, so what does privacy matter? Privacy matters because I mean, it just does. A lot of people go, What are you trying to hide? Everything. Well, why why don't you I mean, why do you care but someone has your email? Because I don't want to get spam, I don't want them to try to hack into my accounts, and I hear it all the time. But pri but you're trying to hide something. What do you got to hide? Everything. I'm not selling drugs here. I just want to talk to my daughter with in private on through email. Come on. So privacy is let me change your a little mindset here. Maybe privacy isn't about hiding, it's not about hiding your information. If you try to do that, you're gonna have a terrible life on the internet. It's about controlling the information you're using. So a little different mindset. Private, not hiding your email address, but giving people an email address you don't give a crap about. It's not hiding your phone number, it's using a phone number that you don't care if it gets exposed. It's not hiding your credit card, it's using a credit card number that can never be used again, and you don't care if it's exposed. So a different mindset of hiding and controlling. I mean, it's like this you're home, you lock your front door, you close your bedroom curtains, you don't publish your bank account online, you don't sit there with your door open all day and night. People can just walk in or they can look through your windows. You don't just publish your stuff online, keep it, hide all that stuff. So, anyway, the information belongs to you, you should be able to control it, and you gotta know how to control it and how not to use a lot of your information. You need to become a harder target. Because a lot of times they do a like a dossier. Okay, let's take Mr. Smith. I've got his phone number, I I need Mr. Smith's zip code. Let me go find his zip code that way I can use it when they ask. I mean, it they literally do research on people. But privacy and security work together. One reduces your exposure, and the other one protects what remains. Okay, so we got to just think a little bit different of controlling our information. So the dark web sounds very mysterious and dangerous, and it is, trust me, a lot of bad things go on the dark web. It is scary. There are there are monsters under the bed, okay? But we don't need it to intimidate you. When you need to be able to go to your digital exposure and just search your information. Searching that doesn't put your email on the dark web. It doesn't. Okay? Think of it this way: if your information is discovered there, it's not the end of the story. It literally is just an early warning system. Uh-oh, my information was breached, hacked. I gotta start doing some stuff. And don't wait until it's too late. What if you find out that you were in that target database four months later? That's the bad thing because you used your real information four months later. You go, oh, I was in that database. Yeah, it could already be exposed at that point. So that's why we need to do, we need to be, it's preventative maintenance. You need to act, you need to use a password manager, you need to use multi-factor authentication, you need to monitor your financial accounts all the time. Try when's the last time you've literally, this is my new thing. I've asked people, when's the last time you've balanced your checkbook? Well, I don't have a checkbook. Well, when's the last time you balanced your checking account? What things are you subscribed to that you forgot? Where are you losing money? Because most hackers they'll start out with ten dollars, forty dollars. They don't want to do four thousand dollars all at once because boom, they're they're finding out. So look and manage and see what's going on there. So again, that website is your digitalexposure.com. Your your code after you run your search, you can't see everything, is privacy ck. One word, privacy ck. You can view your information on the dark web. And I'll put all this and a summary in the notes. And I hope you guys enjoyed this. I hope this will motivate you to go do something. Excuse me, you can go check out the Garvin Academy website. I do a free webinar every month. You can go and sign up for the free webinar. Uh and I go in way more information in the free webinar. That's Garvin G-A-R-V-I-N academy.com. I'll put it in the notes. But every month I do a free webinar and I go through tons of information about how to protect your information, your data, your ID, all that information. And it's free. It's free. Did I say free? I need like echoes free, free, free, free. It is free. And so, guys, God bless you guys. Hope you have a whole a great week. And we'll see you next time on the Prepping Academy Podcast. Take care.

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