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The dark web is a hidden part of the internet not indexed by regular search engines, accessed through specialized browsers like Tor. It hosts both legal and illegal activities, offering anonymity but also posing risks like scams and illicit content. What is the dark web, deep web, and surface web?
- Dark Web
The dark web refers to sites that are not indexed and only...
- Dark Web
- Overview
- What is the open web?
- What is the deep web?
- What is the dark web?
- Dark web: Privacy in a nutshell
- How many dark web sites are there?
- Should I visit the Dark Web?
- What is Tor?
- If the dark web’s secret, how does anyone find anything?
- Can I protect my privacy without going onto the dark web?
News
By Nate Drake, Carrie Marshall, Alexander Vukcevic
last updated 16 December 2022
Everything you wanted to know about the dark web but were too afraid to ask
Image credit: Pixabay (Image credit: Image Credit: TheDigitalArtist / Pixabay)
The dark web sounds foreboding. Why else would the police in Brazil, Germany, and the United States need to raid dark web e-shops like the Wall Street Market and the Silk Road? Charging the operators with a long grocery list of crimes ranging stolen data, drugs, and malware. These things do happen on the dark web, but they are one piece of the jigsaw.
The open or surface web is what you access daily through search engines like Bing or Google. Before you even turn on the device, search engines have crawled through the web, looking for information, evaluating the sources, and listing your options.
This is like the general reading room in your local library. The books are there, they’re precisely organized by theme and title, and you’re free and able to look everywhere. By accessing the normal internet, your device is accessing central servers which will then display the website.
If you have time on your hands, you can just wander through the aisles of a library looking at every book. But if you want to find something specific, you can also ask a Librarian to help you locate it.
Browsers such as Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo act like virtual librarians, sorting and cataloging materials so they can be easily searched. They do this through using “crawlers”, sometimes also known as “spiders” or “robots”. Crawlers can automatically scan websites and their links, then record them. This makes it easy for them (and you) to find websites.
Most corporate and public sites work hard to make sure that these web crawlers can easily find them. This makes perfect sense as the entire purpose of creating a website is so that people can access your content and/or buy your products. Most sites do this by deliberately placing “meta tags” in their website code to make it easier for crawlers to catalog them properly.
Knowing where online materials are – and who is searching for them – makes it possible for search engines like Google to sell advertisements. This accounts for well over 80 percent of the company’s revenue, linking people who are searching with the millions of sites out there that pay Google to list their content.
The term ‘deep web’ doesn’t mean anything nefarious - it’s estimated to make up about 99% of the entire web. It refers to the unindexed web databases and other content that search engines can't crawl through and catalog. The deep web is like an archive, containing an unsorted pile of websites and resources that are largely inaccessible to normal users.
This could include sites not automatically available to the public, such as those which require a password. Examples of this might be e-mail accounts or registration-only forums.
There are also millions of servers which only store data which can’t be accessed via a public web page. Data brokers such as LocalBlox for instance crawl the web and store information about business and consumers to sell for marketing purposes.
Deep sites also include company intranets and governmental websites, for instance the website of the European Union. You may be able to search such pages but you do so using their own internal search function, not a search engine like Bing or Yahoo. This means content of such sites isn’t accessible to web crawlers.
The dark web, despite massive media attention, is an extremely small part of the deep web.
The term is very general, as there are actually a number of ‘darknets’ available such as ‘Freenet’ and ‘I2P’ but the TOR network has become the most popular. So, when most people refer to the dark net, they mean Tor.
The acronym stands for The Onion Router. A reference to how Tor works; sending encrypted traffic through layers of relays around the globe as it hides content, the sender, and their location. Users need a special browser with added software to access the tor dark web in the first place.
Not only is browsing via tor more secure, it also is more private as it effectively shuts out online trackers. The Tor browser is based on Firefox and makes use of extensions like ‘NoScript’ to prevent harmful code from loading and there’s a built-in ad blocker (see below).
While it is not flawless in protecting user privacy, it works well enough to give users much more privacy in where they go, the content accessed, and protecting their identity and location. The multiple relays help keep some distance and anonymity between the person visiting the website, the website itself, and any entity trying to eavesdrop on the communication between the two.
Tor is both a type of connection – with the extended relays – and a browser. With your device running a Tor browser, you can go to Tor-specific sites – those with an .onion suffix -- or also visit the usual sites on the open web. The connection between Tor's dark net and the regular internet is bridged via an ‘exit node’. Any internet traffic leaving the exit node is no longer part of Tor's dark web. For maximum security users should only access sites with the .onion suffix via the browser.
Alexander Vukcevic, head of the Avira Protection Labs, explains: "With the open, deep, and dark web, there is a difference in who can track you. With a usual open web search,the search engine knows where you are, the number of your device, your IP address, and the theme of the search.
“On the deep web, you can assume that activities are monitored at the gateway. The major difference from the open web is that it is system admin -- not the search engine -- that can follow your activities.
No one knows precisely how many dark web sites there are out there. Tor is designed to be resistant to web crawling but the number of active ones probably only number in the thousands.
Finding these can prove a challenge, as searching on the dark web can be irritation – visually and operationally. Before finding a treasure of odd substances or private information, you’re likely to hit a number of dead ends.
Unlike the open web, these sites aren’t really worried about being found by on-page SEO tools like web crawlers. While there are Google-like equivalents trying to categorize the dark web, results are spotty. There are some supposed ‘dark web’ search engines like Torch or Haystak is said to have indexed more .onion sites than any other search engine. But claims like these are hard to prove.
Part of the reason for this is lack of incentive for content creators on the dark web. Those on Tor aren’t worried about cleaning up their website with the latest SEO tools to boost their relative ranking on the Google and Bing charts.
Since your connection is routed through multiple tor relays, page loading times can be very slow making effective searching extremely time-consuming.
The dark net is tiny when compared to both the open and the deep web, estimated to total around 50,000 sites.
For most of us, the short answer is that there's no reason to: unless you're really paranoid about your privacy or you're doing something that really needs anonymity, such as reporting on repressive regimes or crime syndicates or trying to bypass state censorship, there's no real reason to venture onto the Dark Web at all - not least because it slows down your browsing.
There's a fascinating thread on Reddit (not remotely safe for work) where dark web users share their stories. Some of the tales are enough to make you tape over your webcam and disable your router just in case. Think of it as the dodgy bit of town where sensible people don't go after dark. It’s the wild west.
Tor stands for Thin Onion Routing, and in 2013 UK MP Julian Smith described it as "the black internet where child pornography, drug trafficking and arms trading take place". He's not wrong:
Tor is where the now-defunct Silk Road drugs marketplace could be found, it's where Black Market Reloaded traded drugs and weapons, and it's where the US National Security Agency says "very naughty people" hang out. It's not the only network on the Dark Web - for example, you may have heard of the Freenet anti-censorship network - but it's by far the most popular.
According to an investigation by Deep Web watchers Vocativ, European terrorists who wanted guns used to "tap into a 20-year-old market that took root and flourished at the end of the Balkan wars. Now with the rise of the dark net, that market has been digitized and deals on illegal guns are only a few minutes away." Many of those deals are from people in the US: Vocativ found 281 listings of guns and ammunition on the dark web, the majority of which were shipping from America.
It's not that Tor is evil; it's just that the same tools that protect political dissidents are pretty good at protecting criminals too.
That wasn't intentional. Tor was initially developed by the US Navy. Its goal was to allow ships to communicate with each other and their bases without revealing their location. It does this by bouncing users' and sites' traffic through multiple relays to disguise where they are.
It's also used by political activists and dissidents, journalists, people who don't trust websites' use of their personal data, and the odd member of the tin foil hat brigade, convinced the government is spying on them at all times.
For many people, the answer is by using regular websites such as Reddit. Dedicated subreddits guide newcomers around the Dark Web. The moderators enforce a strict policy against posting links to illegal products or services, so you’re more likely to find safer dark web addresses here.
On the open web, there are certain Wikis which are like a kind of Yahoo! for destinations on the Tor network - albeit a Yahoo! where many of the links are likely to land you in prison, which is why we aren't naming or linking to them.
You don't need the dark web to protect your identity online. While Tor is a powerful tool for defending your privacy, it isn't the only one.
Tor doesn’t protect the data on your device itself, for example. But you can do this through using open-source encryption software such as Veracrypt. Using open-source means there’s far less chance of any security flaws or deliberate backdoors as the code is constantly reviewed by the community.
There are also privacy and anonymous browsers, which are designed to keep you safe on the regular ‘open’ web. For example, the Epic browser is programmed to always run in private mode, so it doesn't store data about which sites you visit. It is based on Chromium, the open-source of Google chrome but the developers claim to have removed all Google tracking software and that the browser stops other companies from tracing you too.
If you do just want to stop ad networks tracking you, browser plugins such as Ghostery can block trackers. You should also consider installing an ad blocker, which will prevent most harmful or marketing URLs from loading in the first place.
While ad blockers can prevent most harmful links from loading, you should also take steps to protect yourself from malware to keep your data safe from hackers and scammers. Consider installing antivirus software.
As most malware is designed for Windows, another way to stay safe is to switch to a different operating system. Most versions of Linux such as Ubuntu are free of charge and a the best Linux distros makes it easy to get set up and started in this environment, especially if you’re coming from an OS like Windows.
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Feb 28, 2022 · The dark web gets a bad reputation as a haven for illegal activity, but there are in fact benefits of the Dark Web that are often overlooked. Is the dark web safe? It’s usually safe to access the dark web.
Explore the hidden depths of the dark web: Learn how to access it safely, understand its unique structure, and navigate its risks while protecting your privacy and security. Check out our free Dark Web scanner below to monitor your digital footprint and potential vulnerabilities online.
Jan 17, 2023 · What is the Dark Web? Our step-by-step tutorial will explain how to use the Dark Web safely and with complete privacy. Cautionary advice from the experts.
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