The internet is a vast and complicated environment; most people can only see a small part of it. The deep web, which has most online information, is below the public web. The dark web is even more profound. It’s a secret place that you can only get to with special software. This story delves into the dark web’s mysteries, showing how its networks are hidden and the illegal things that happen in its dark, shadowy hallways.
The Surface Web
There are billions of pages on the Internet today, which might be too much for the average person to handle. Even stranger is the fact that these simple websites make up 7–10% of the whole Internet. They make up the web on top. The deep web, also known as the dark web, is where most of the Internet is kept.
Search engines show the viewable World Wide Web, which has billions of websites anyone can visit when you type in some buzzwords. A web crawler, the meta-search engine that combines, links, and ranks search results from different platforms on the leading web, lets you access these. It keeps track of all the websites and links to their pages on the leading web. Based on their content, it ranks them and puts them in an index.
Studying The Deep Web
The deep web is one step further into the depths of the Internet. Search engines can’t find websites on the “deep web,” and Web crawlers aren’t allowed to access these sites or use their public links. These sites are intentionally hidden or can’t be found because of how they are set up. There are several ways to stop them from being indexed.
The owners have made it so that their pages can’t be linked to from other websites or search engines, so you can’t find them that way. Technically, you can also block access to them by using a captcha. You must log in to these services before seeing any pages.
For instance, you can only get to a lot of content on PasteBin or GitHub that needs links back to the source through specific search tools. The deep web also includes other websites for particular people and can only be viewed with their passwords.
Discovering The Dark Web
In the same way that the ocean hides secrets, the internet’s dark web hides horrible stories. There is a lot of mystery on the dark web because everyone who uses it is private.
To give you a better idea of the Dark Web or Dark nets, they are networks that are built on top of the Internet and are highly protected. You can only access them with special software. People who are just surfing the public web can’t access the sites on the dark web.
The fact that no one can see who visits these sites makes them called “dark.” Many people use the dark web to support illegal actions. The most illicit, well-known thing on the dark web was when Ross William Ulbricht, also known as “dread pirate Roberts,” made Silk Road.
It took 2 years and 9 months for Silk Road to make $1.2 billion, mostly from selling drugs and other illegal things. After that, the US federal government took it apart in September 2013. The Onion Router, the most popular network on the dark web, had 4 million users worldwide in the same year.
The Onion Router
These sites can be found on secret networks, such as Tor (the onion server), or on peer-to-peer networks, such as the Invisible Internet Project (I2P), which can also be reached through web browsers. To protect its users’ privacy, the dark web sends data over an encrypted network several times.
The dark web is not open to regular people. To get to it, you need to be able to connect to a secret network. To protect its users’ privacy, the dark web has many rules that must be followed. The US Navy made the Onion Router browser one of the most famous ways to browse the dark web without being tracked.
How Does Tor Protect Privacy?
This free, easy-to-use, and very secure software can be set up in minutes and sends network data through several Tor sites worldwide. If an information file is stolen while being sent, it only shows the source and user as random nodes. So, the dark web looks like a galaxy full of mobile hubs that are all fired up.
Because of how route nodes work, following a person around the dark web is impossible. Many sites on the dark web don’t end in “.com,” “.org,” or “.gov.” Instead, their top-level domain (TLD) ends in “.onion.” You can only access these TLDs with websites or apps that run on the Tor network, such as the Orbot or Orfox mobile apps.
Using A Darknet
Depending on what you want to do on the dark web, like communicate or browse anonymously, there are different ways to get in or access it. They are also different in how safe they are, depending on their route and encryption methods.
Darknet For Friends
Friend-to-friend is a peer-to-peer service that can be reached through a particular set of IP addresses. The owners of other IPs can stop them to hide the fact that they are on the network. It is safer to use the F2F network because every transaction is secured with extra layers of security code.
Sneak Peek: Dark Web Events
The Internet is a stream of data, and much of it is private. The surface Internet is changing very quickly. Since the outer web is small, the deep web is very big.
In July 2016, it was found that 46% of people worldwide were online.
In February 2017, it was found that the surface net had 1.154 billion pages.
The Deep web is 4000 times bigger than the open web, and it’s growing so fast that it’s hard to measure.
Information that moves through the public web is often hacked, stolen, and sold. On the “dark web,” people sell everything from medical records and IDs to photos, passports, credit card information, subscription accounts, internet history, and even bank account information.
The dark web is where this black market for information is held. Someone can buy and sell stolen information there without being seen. The dark web is a simple way to sell information to the right people. Because they hide names, this is one reason why Cryptocurrencies were quickly used for illegal activities.
Many experts investigated the dark web to find out what was going on. In January 2018, 6,608 dark websites were crawled. These websites ranged from funny to scary, and this is what they found.
Dark Web Contents
There are many scams and illegal things on the “dark web.” Something new can be bought on the dark web every second, from goods that copy credit cards to brilliant Bitcoin scams. On the dark web, a very troubling number of sites selling private pictures and sexual material, as well as sites that abuse children, were discovered.
The dark web is home to more than 50,000 radical terrorist groups.
Also, the 750 TB of info on the 60 most significant sites on the dark web is put together. It’s wild that this data alone is 40 times bigger than all the data on the leading web.
The Dark Web’s Monopoly
The Dark Web is the only place where secret information about businesses can be hacked. Businesses have been spending a lot of money to protect the information stolen and found on the dark web. Even though the number of leaks has decreased, the damage each one causes has increased drastically.
In 2017, businesses spent up to $140 to protect each record from being misused or broken. But you can’t be sure that the information you buy on the dark web is accurate. Because of this, it can be made up to hurt the names of businesses. Buyers rate the information sellers to get an idea of how reliable the information they offer is.
Adding Tor To Geography
It is impossible to mark where people use The Onion Router to connect to the Dark Web. Some countries are more likely than others to be to blame for the Dark Web.
- 19.2% of Tor users are from the United States, making them the country with the most users.
- 11.9% of people who use Tor are from Russia.
- Germany is where 9% of all Tor traffic comes from.
- 9.2% of traffic from the UAE goes through Tor.
- Visual Capitalist says in a study that the US Government pays for 80% of Tor.
Conclusion
The well-known websites you can find online through search engines are known as the “surface web.” Only 7% of these sites are on the whole World Wide Web. The rest of the Internet is called the “deep web,” a highly protected world you can’t usually browse. It’s called the “Dark web” because a specific part of the Internet is used for illegal things.
The Dark Web gives all users complete privacy. People buy and sell private data, malware, and material against the law on the dark web. Most companies need to know about the dark web when making security plans. It’s essential to consider the vast internet as a threat factor when planning how to deal with threat factors.