But there is actually very little we can do to get rid of these darker, shadier and raunchier online activities. The thought of a dark web lurking underneath our own ‘regular’ internet may seem very frightening, especially because it accounts - according to some sources - for up to 70% of the entire internet. These service providers may well have created their own DDoS infrastructure by purchasing malware on the very same site. And of course you can find loads of service providers on sites such as ‘Rent-aHacker’ who can write advanced malware or even DDoS attacks for a very fair price. This is just a tiny portion of what you can find in the dark web: forged passports - 500 euro for a fake Belgian identity is a true bargain, no? -, escrow services, and less savory products such as child pornography pictures and videos. Only the type of products and services differs drastically from the eBay offering: Alphabay shows categories such as drugs, counterfeit and all types of weapons. It takes just a few clicks to gain access to sites such as Alphabay, which you could describe as “eBay’s evil twin”: just like eBay, the products and services are subdivided into categories, and vendors come with recommendations by other customers.
That is why the dark web nowadays has become synonymous with dark and shady activities. Other TOR browser users were less politically inspired but still had noble motivations to browse anonymously: they did not want other parties - such as Facebook, Google or even the government - to have access to their browsing history or other personal data.īut every technology - however noble the motivation of the creators - soon finds its way to less noble applications as well. That’s when browsers such as TOR became popular: they allowed surfers to browse in all anonymity. People protesting against an absolutist regime were looking for means to communicate with the outside world without getting caught by the regime. Ironically, criminal activities were not the original purpose when the first ‘dark’ pages were created. The very popular TOR browser builds on this imagery: it is an abbreviation of The Onion Router. Why onion? Because the actual message and the location of a message sender is hidden behind several layers of encryption, which makes it hard to intercept and decrypt it for outsiders. onion, which can be considered the dark web equivalent of our. The dark web is nowadays closely linked to activities that don’t want to see the light of day: arms dealing, counterfeit, child pornography. the underwater part of an iceberg, indeed. We call this invisible part the ‘deep web’, with part of it being the ’dark web’. Underneath is an invisible part, which forms the majority of the internet sites worldwide. What we can see is only a minor part of the total internet. Have you ever thought of the internet as an iceberg? There are some good reasons to do so. By Olivier Bertrand, Presales Engineer at Trend Micro.