Thursday, April 4, 2019

What is Dark Web?

Sagar Panta April 04, 2019 Bitcoin , CERTIFIED ETHICAL HACKER , Hacking , technology 2 comments :

What is Dark Web and Deep Web?

Ø Introduction:

Hi, welcome to the new post. I'm sure by now that everyone has heard of the dark web commonly known as the epicenter of illegal online activity a vast secret cyber underworld. It's called the dark web and people aren't using it to buy shoes they're buying drugs weapons. Anything you can imagine the subterranean realm is sinister and untraceable with consequences that can be deadly.

People may also be familiar with 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 how did this all start in this post we'll take a look at both the Deep Web and the dark web. For starters, let's take a look at some basics. The web can be defined into three categories.

Ø Understanding

First, there's the surface web and that's everything that's open and available. Basically, everything that can be found is 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 and 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 you use masked IP addresses to hide the identity of the visitors.

Ø History of Darknet

So, where did this dark web come from? In 1969 a couple of university students sent the world's first computers to compete for 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 it would be logical to assume that tor was invented by a group of anti-establishment coders and criminals trying to evade government control. Looking at the illegal activity of the dark web this makes sense. However, quite paradoxically tor was invented by the US Naval Research Laboratory to allow intelligence personnel to transfer information securely. Another agency of the US Department of Defense called DARPA further developed all and in 2002 they made it available to the public. To this very day, tor is still funded in part by the US government.

Ø Deeper dive into Darknet

Ok so let's take a deeper dive and take an interesting look at the deep and dark web. Firstly it's huge and its 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 combined the deep and dark web is over 96% of the entire web. When you do an internet search you're only searching 0.03 percent of the entire web. The dark web is such a nefarious place that you can get scams based around murder. In one case people kept falling for an elaborate scam to hire hitmen. A website called Besser mafia claim to offer the toughest Albanian hitman services. But in reality, it was two Eastern European men tricking people into handing over their money to pay for hit jobs that actually didn't happen. It said that you can find anything from an AK-47 to rocket launcher on the dark web if you look hard enough. Criminals have also been discovered selling fake degrees certifications and passports. People have also hired hackers to break into university systems just to change their grades. Stolen identities up for grabs from the dark web. Passwords for individual bank accounts cost around 160 dollars. And your full identity about $1,200.

On the dark web, there's also a hidden Wikipedia. This contains Wikipedia articles that are immune to censorship. One of the most infamous sites on the dark web is the marketplace Silk Road.

Here, many things can be purchased with Bitcoin but mostly illicit drugs and fraudulent documentation such as a passport. Being mostly anonymous Bitcoin among other cryptocurrencies was instrumental in allowing Silk Road and any anonymous marketplace to run. Approximately a hundred and seventy thousand bitcoins were seized by the US government from Silk Road and Oh bridges personal account at the time this was roughly a hundred million US dollars. You've sold at the peak of bitcoins price in 2017 it would be worth approximately 2.8 billion US dollars.

The New York Times and other news outlets have opened onion sites to allow 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're getting into before accessing it. Many sites need invites and a lot of people provide very specific services stumbling upon a site.