The Dark Web

  Adewale Ifeoluwa 

    The dark web is commonly known as the epicenter of illegal online activity. It is sinister and untraceable with consequences that can be deadly. You might have heard of the Silk Road or at least its history, the online marketplace where you could buy narcotics with absolute anonymity. But the dark web is part of something much bigger, the DEEP WEB which makes up 90% of the entire web. Through our internet searches in our daily lives we only see a tip of the iceberg.

    Let's take a look at the basics of the web

There are three categories: first there's the SURFACE WEB and that's everything that's open and available, basically everything that can be found through a Google search.

Following this is the DEEP WEB, this is the portion of the internet that's hidden from conventional search engines and it contains unindexed websites. Here you can find personal information like your payroll and medical records or a corporation's private data.

Finally there's the DARK WEB, here sites are intentionally hidden from search engines sites and the dark web can only be accessed through special browsers which use masked IP addresses to hide the identity of the visitors.

   So where did this Dark Web come from, In 1969 a couple of university students sent the world's first computers to compete a message it was sent on ARPANET, an early ancestor to the internet. The concept of connecting computers together was a radical idea at the time and at certain motions the progression to the modern internet but ever since there has been the internet or any form of internet people have used it for illegal online activity. In fact, one of the first-ever e-commerce transactions was a drug deal in 1970, it was done between two students at MIT and Stanford. In the 1980s people also attempted to create data havens in small countries with relaxed laws, these early examples were nowhere near as sophisticated as the modern dark web. However, they illustrate the point that they have always been people who wanted to use the web to escape the eyes of the authorities or everyone's eyes for that matter.

In the mid-1990s things started to get interesting, a technology called TOR was created, TOR stands for The Onion Router and is a browser which allows users to exchange information anonymously online. Peer-to-peer networks like Tor are the backbone of the dark web. For the dark web to exist it needs anonymity, Tor manages this by hiding the identity of the user by bouncing the connection through three different servers around the world adding a layer of encryption each time hence the name onion.

Tor was created by the US Naval Research Laboratory to allow intelligence personnel to 

transfer information securely and in 2002 they made it available to the public. To this  very day Tor is still funded in part by the US government. But why would the US government fund and allow the general public to access Tor, well the idea was to make it difficult for anyone to decipher which information on the dark web was created by intelligence officers. It is easier to remain anonymous in a sea of anonymous users, simply the more users there are, the better.

   It's important to note that without Tor the darknet would still exist, Tor is simply one dark web browser to which there are many. In 2014, Dr.Gareth Owen provided a breakdown of the sites on the darkweb by classification, his research found that drug market places are the most common type of site, this was followed by other market places include fraud sites and Bitcoin sites used for money laundering.

 

Let's take a deeper dive and take an interesting look at the deep and dark web

Firstly, it's huge and it's size is growing rapidly, a 2001 study done by the University of California discovered that the dark web had 7.5 petabytes or 7500 gigabytes of information. In just two years this number increased to over 91,000 petabytes, today cpmbined, the deep and dark web is over 96% of the entire web to give you more of an idea of the scale 60 of the largest deep web sites exceed the entire surface internet by 40 times. When you do an internet search you're only searching 0.03% of the entire web. The dark web is such a nefarious place, you can find anything from an ak-47 to a rocket launcher if you look hard enough. Criminals have also been discovered selling fake degrees, certifications and passports. On the dark web, there is also hidden Wikipedia, this contains Wikipedia articles that are immune from censorship.

   Tor and the dark web has been crucial to whistleblowers, The New York Times and other news outlets have opened onion sites to allow for people to anonymously submit information so the dark web isn't really a place to surf, it's a place that allows you to do specific things and people should really know what they are getting into before accessing it. 

This article is an excerpt from a Coldfusion Video.