NordStellar Review 2025: Does It Live Up to the Nord Name?

NordStellar’s Cost

We’re not starting with NordStellar’s best foot forward. Their pricing isn’t transparent and there’s no getting around that. They don’t publish pricing of any kind on their website. Instead, they require customers to reach out to schedule a demo, after which they gather additional information about your company, such as the number of employees. From there, NordStellar creates a custom quote to fulfill your threat-exposure needs. Based on our experience, that process takes well over a week.

That may seem shady, but it’s par for the course in the industry. Other popular threat exposure management platforms, including Darktrace, Cymulate, and Tenable One, don’t have any published pricing either. That’s something we’d like to see changed, but we can’t knock NordStellar too much for sticking to industry norms.

NordStellar’s Capabilities

The NordStellar dashboard gave us an overview of our current and historical digital threats.

We saw each of NordStellar’s capabilities in action during our demo. NordStellar showed us how easy it is to get up and running with their software too. All they did at the beginning was plug in our domain name and let the software run its magic. They didn’t need any of our internal data or accounts. Since it’s so easy to set up, you can still make use of these NordStellar capabilities even if you don’t have a dedicated cybersecurity person.

With just the domain name, NordStellar could monitor all of our external-facing assets, including our cloud servers through AWS, employee email addresses, IP addresses, and, of course, our domain name. We could extend its monitoring to specific keywords, such as our CEO’s name or our company’s physical address.

What does NordStellar monitor for? Let’s dig in.

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Compromised Data Monitoring

NordStellar’s Combo List showed us which data leaks included an email address with its associated password.

Odds are, at least one of your employees’ credentials has been compromised. Unless your organization takes cybersecurity seriously, most of your employees have probably had their credentials leaked. We know it’s alarming, and we felt the same way during our demo with NordStellar. To our surprise, they identified over 70 employees with leaked data. It shouldn’t have been too surprising, though, considering our doxxing study found that less than 40 percent of people use security software to protect their data.

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Not all leaked data is alike though. We publish some of our team’s email addresses right on our site so you can contact them if you have any questions. Seeing those email addresses pop up on the dark web was expected. What really sent a shiver down our spine was when those email addresses had passwords associated with them.

It was nerve-racking seeing so many of our credentials leaked online, but having that information meant we could take proactive steps to prevent any damage from occurring. Unlike most competitors, NordStellar lets us see the leaked passwords in plain text so we could immediately change them as needed. That would prevent someone from buying the credentials and being able to use them.

How does NordStellar identify compromised data? They maintain one of the largest dark web data pools in the industry. That means they monitor secret websites for credentials related to your domain name. When they find one of your credentials, they see what other information about your company is posted on that page and share all of that information with you.

NordStellar goes beyond dark web monitoring by also monitoring large chat rooms, telegram channels, forums, and other encrypted communication channels hackers use to buy and sell information. Basically, they look for your data in the same places people go to buy and sell compromised data. That gives you a warning to make changes before any damage occurs. That warning can come through Slack or email.

Account Takeover Detection and Protection

One of our employees had their contact information, full name, and location leaked in a data breach.

Finding leaked data is one thing, but putting that information to use is another. Thankfully, NordStellar does both. We found out that account takeover prevention was developed first as an internal tool. Nord Security also runs NordVPN, a popular consumer VPN tool. They developed their account takeover suite of tools to help their own business stop the threats.

Consumer accounts frequently get sold on the dark web. NordVPN has legitimate customers who pay for an account, and then hackers try to expose that legitimate customer’s login information so they can sell it on the dark web. That results in unauthorized users accessing the account and, on some occasions, blocking the legitimate customer from using the account. As you’d expect, Nord Security told us resolving those issues took up a huge amount of their customer-support team’s time.

So they developed the account takeover tools we used with NordStellar. Once it identified compromised data, it cross-referenced accounts using that data and notified our cybersecurity team. That gave our team the information needed to stop threats before they materialize into damages.

That’s not all it did though. It also monitored our account registration pages for uses of compromised credentials. That comes in handy more frequently than you’d think. We make our employees change their passwords every 90 days, but they tend to reuse passwords they already use for their other accounts. If they try to reuse a password they use on a personal account that was involved in a data breach, NordStellar would stop them. It takes things a step further, too, by also preventing employees from using similar passwords that a hacker would commonly try when the compromised password doesn’t work.

NordStellar can’t prevent account takeover completely, but they gave our team the tools needed to minimize risks.

Session Hijacking Prevention

We didn’t have any employees with malware, so NordStellar showed us a real example of what that alert would look like.

In addition to buying login credentials, hackers can get credentials at your company through session hijacking. That’s when malware infects a browser through the browser’s session cookies to steal any inputted data.

On a personal level, that usually means leaked passwords. When applied to a business, however, those compromised sessions can be used to access internal assets such as cloud databases with customer data, employee data, or vendor data. Monitoring for session hijacking helps employees protect their identities and businesses protect their assets.

To identify infected browsers, NordStellar once again used its dark web data pool. Except instead of monitoring for credentials, it monitored for session cookies associated with our organization. It then reported that malware to our security team. In the report, we were told the session cookie and device that was compromised. That way, our team could secure the device and, in some cases, provide more training to the employee.

There’s also a proactive side to NordStellar’s session hijacking prevention toolset. When it detects a compromised session, it can invalidate the active session and prevent it from accessing additional internal assets.

What Features Are Missing From NordStellar?

NordStellar let us search for leaked data and stolen accounts with any keyword we wanted.

We wish NordStellar would add an attack path analysis feature. That would let our team see potential ways cybercriminals could compromise our data. That would help with the prevention side of threat management, since it could guide our team toward securing accounts before they get compromised.

Attack path analysis can also highlight high-risk areas in an organization. If one of our cloud providers uses weaker security protocols, for instance, we could transfer high-value data assets out of the weaker cloud provider and into a stronger one. The weaker cloud provider likely offers lower-cost storage, so we can transfer low-value assets that aren’t as sensitive to the less-secure provider. That information would keep our cloud costs low while minimizing risks.

On the convenience side, we wish NordStellar offered a bundle with NordLayer. They both offer business protections, and, when put together, offer fairly comprehensive digital security. NordLayer brings in network and end-point security, preventing malware on devices that could spread through an organization.

Recap: Should You Use NordStellar to Protect Your Business in 2025?

As a threat management platform, NordStellar excels. They maintain one of the largest dark web data pools in the industry, which means their scans for compromised data are more comprehensive. NordStellar doesn’t stop at the dark web either. They also monitor forums, Telegram channels, and other communication platforms that are popular with hackers.

NordStellar pairs those warnings with actionable insights through their account takeover and session hijacking tools. When changing passwords or creating new accounts, NordStellar warns you if using a password that’s already compromised or a similar one. It also detects browser-based attacks through compromised session cookies to prevent session hijacking attempts.

Although NordStellar doesn’t offer complete cybersecurity protection, it also doesn’t market itself that way. It’s meant to be paired with NordLayer for end-point and network security. Between the two, that can protect your business from most external threats.

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