After completing the form, the system will prompt you to select a meeting time.
On our first call, we will determine whether and how we can help. From there, we discuss your current state under the protection of a non-disclosure agreement and craft a tailored plan to move you and your company forward. Last, we carry out that plan together in a way that saves you time, money, and stress.
Beyond Domains: The Expanding External Threat Landscape
By
Erkin Djindjiev and Michael Sviben, DomainGuard
As organizations strengthen their internal security, attackers are shifting their focus — exploiting what’s outside your firewall. The external threat landscape has evolved far beyond just domains and IP addresses. Today, it includes employee data on data broker sites, leaked credentials on the dark web, chatter on adversarial forums, and impersonations through ads and decentralized platforms. In this article, we highlight what you need to know about these risks and how to improve your visibility.
The New Shape of External Risk
Your attack surface no longer stops at the perimeter of your network. It now extends into:
Data broker sites and social media. Employee names, emails, and job titles are harvested and misused by attackers.
Dark web forums and Telegram channels. Leaked credentials, phishing kits, and discussions about targeting your business are shared in places that most organizations don’t monitor.
Decentralized domains (e.g., Handshake domains). These blockchain-based domains are difficult to track, offering attackers a platform for hard-to-take-down impersonation sites.
Search engine and ad abuse. Fraudsters are increasingly leveraging SEO manipulation and paid ads to direct victims to fake support pages, phishing sites, or fraudulent offers.
Why It Matters
The reality is that most organizations focus on what they can see: their corporate assets and internal infrastructure. But threat actors exploit blind spots — what’s beyond your domain. The chatter on dark web marketplaces, for example, can provide early warnings of planned attacks, while leaked credentials on a paste site could be the first sign of an imminent breach. Without visibility into these areas, organizations are at a disadvantage.
Dark Web: The Blind Spot
The dark web is unindexed, often invite-only, and typically outside the reach of basic security tools. It’s where private communications, planning, and trading of stolen data take place. Threat actors discuss tactics, share breach data, and coordinate phishing campaigns. Gaining visibility into these spaces is difficult — but crucial.
How to Improve Your Visibility
Here’s how organizations can start addressing external threats:
Invest in external monitoring. Whether through internal capabilities or third-party solutions, proactive monitoring of adversarial forums, dark web chatter, and data leaks is essential.
Map your external exposure. Know what data about your organization is publicly accessible or exposed — from employee details to forgotten cloud assets.
Expand incident detection to external signals. Include external mentions, leaked credentials, or domain impersonations in your threat detection playbooks.
Act on findings. Build processes for responding to external threats: report impersonation domains, request ad takedowns, and notify partners of fraud attempts.
The Bottom Line
Attackers rely on what you don’t see. The external threat landscape is broad and fast-moving — but with the right visibility and response strategies, you can stay ahead of these risks.
At Access Point Consulting, we help organizations move beyond domain defense to build comprehensive external monitoring programs that uncover hidden threats before they become crises.
Optimizing cloud spend is a priority for organizations of all sizes. Without proactive management, on-demand resources can unexpectedly inflate monthly bills, leading to unnecessary expenses. In a recent webinar, Access Point’s CIO Anthony Rivera and Director of Infrastructure Services Kevin Hartwig, shared their expertise on practical ways to control and reduce cloud costs. In this article, we share some of their insights.
In our recent session with Fortinet, we explored why achieving Zero Trust remains so challenging, realizing that success depends less on technology and more on adopting a continuous, people-centered approach that prioritizes visibility, integration, and adaptive security across today’s hybrid environments.
When Anthony Rivera, Access Point’s CIO, and Stephen Watkins, Fortinet’s Principal Cybersecurity Advisor sat down to talk about endpoint detection and response, the goal wasn’t to out-nerd the audience. It was to make sense of the alphabet soup—EDR, MDR, XDR—for the people who actually rely on it.
