Dark Web- See what's beneath internet

• Surface Web: Surface web is collection of web sites and pages which are indexed and been accessible through search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc.

• Deep Web: The missed out part like sites which can’t be accessed by search engines.

• Dark Web: It is small part of deep web which is intentionally hidden which neither be accessed nor can be indexed through common search engines.

Today from all such webs, I am going to share my views on Dark Web. Dark web is small part of deep web. It is vast, secret, cyber underworld. It accumulates about 94% of internet. Rest 4% is of surface web which is accessible and can be indexed by search engines. It’s not perfectly secret but it’s collection of thousands of illicit sites which are visible publicly, can be accessible but the IP address of operators can’t be determined. It uses the software tor (The Onion Router), I2P, etc. for anonymity.

Tor software encrypts the traffic data and passes it over to next random computer in the world. Thus this encrypted data passes over to different computers all over the world where each computer removes single layer of encrypted data. Tor provides anonymity to both the one who operates the site and the one who uses the site. This anonymity provided by tor is called as hidden services. Thus, to access such hidden services tor browser is needed.

This hidden services are not hidden to all, but those who knows the URL address of sites having .onion extension can easily use this sites. But the twist is dark web sites often use scrambled URLs for their sites which are difficult to remember. For example, popular website named Dream Market has unintelligible address “eajwlvm3z2lcca76.onion”. Dark web is named dark because it is hidden, which can’t be indexed by search engines.

As you request access to dark web sites through Tor browser, it renders your IP address untraceable and unidentifiable. This is done by thousands of volunteers around the world. Tor browser is magic which results unpredictably and unreliably us to the world of dark web which is hidden from this world of chaos.

Dark Web doesn’t have only illegal sites instead it is helpful for journalists to put there points unknowingly. Also tor provides hidden services to news organizations to get the anonymous submissions. Tor provides same hidden services to criminals to perform evil tasks like hacking, child pornography, selling drugs and weapons, to circumvent censorship, etc. It’s not totally about illicit things but there are plenty of sources which provides us knowledge like, if we want to learn about privacy, protection, crypto-currency, etc. then we can go to dark web.

Some dark web sites provide all kind of illicit materials like drugs, guns, and credit card numbers which are hacked, stolen subscription accounts, counterfeit money, also hacked Netflix accounts. This all helps you to enter into other peoples computers. You can also buy login credential account to a $50,000 Bank of America for just $500. For $500 you can also get seven prepaid debit cards each having $2,500 balance in it. You can also get $3,000 counterfeit $20 bills for $600. The last from my side but not the least, you can get lifetime Netflix premium account for just $6. Private Bay which is a site of BitTorrent and which is officially shut downed is still present on dark web sites. Also Facebook has presence there which allows to use it anonymously.

In late 1990s dark web search engines do exists like Grams, The Hidden Wiki, etc. but they give irrelevant results, timed-out connections, 404 error, etc. for multiple times which results in to frustration and eventually Tor browser was introduced which is the door to heaven called dark web. Most of experts says that the invisible web (deep web) is almost 500 times bigger than the visible web (surface web).

Researchers from Kings’ College in London, namely Daniel Moore and Thomas Rid counted that there are 2,723 dark web sites from which 57% are hosts of illicit materials. This research is carried out almost a couple of years ago.

Some commerce sites can be shut down or disappear suddenly although it exists since years whenever the site owner wants to. If the site owner decides to flee off with the escrow money of the customers who have invested in there sites. Sites constantly changes there addresses in order to avoid distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS). As result, when we are surfing on dark web sites, we get too much outdated contents.

Using dark web is not illegal but it also depends on your activities, so for such reason you should be aware of some things before using dark web.

• Make sure government law enforcement organization is able to track you.

• Cover your webcam and any other such devices connected with your system through which you are accessing dark web site.

• Turn “NoScript” extension on Tor browser.

• And don’t trust anyone on Dark web sites.

Dark web is not the way to hellhole instead, it’s answer to internet privacy.

#Dark #Privacy #Illegal #Underground #Criminals