Exploring the Dark web | The Unseen Side of Internet - Learnwithbiswas

What Is Dark Web?

 

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? 

For starters, let's take a look at some basics. The web can be defined into 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. 
• 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 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 computer to compute 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 it set in motion 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 there 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 see 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, tours invented by the US Naval Research Laboratory to allow intelligent 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. 

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's 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 dark net would still exist. 

Tor is simply one dark web browser to which there are many. It's kind of like if Google Chrome was shut down tomorrow, the internet would still exist. In 2014, Dr. Gareth Owen provided a breakdown of the sites on the dark web by classification. His research found that drug marketplaces were by far the most common type of site. This was followed by other marketplaces, including fraud sites and Bitcoin sites, which are mainly used for money laundering.

 

Okay, 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 darkweb had 7.5 petabytes or 7500 gigabytes of information. In just two years, this number increased to over 90 1000 petabytes. Today combined, 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 collectively exceed the size of the entire surface internet by 40 times when you do an internet search you only searching 0.03% 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 Best a mafia claims to offer the toughest Albanian hitmen 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. After getting their initial payment, the fraudsters often strung customers along by lying to them and making up stories about why the killing hadn't happened yet. 

They even started a fake moral panic around the issue. They started up false campaign groups and petitions calling for the best and mafia website to be shut down. This is a convoluted effort to make it look legitimate.

It said that you can find anything from an ak 47 two 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 are up for grabs on the dark web passwords for individual bank accounts cost around $160 and your full identity about $1,200. 

On the dark web, there's also a hidden Wikipedia. This contains Wikipedia articles that are immune from censorship. One of the most infamous sites on the dark web is the marketplace Silk Road. The name comes from an ancient network of trade routes which connected Europe, parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The name was borrowed by Russell birch in 2011, when he set up the first Silk Road marketplace under the alias Dread Pirate Roberts. 

Here many things can be purchased with Bitcoin, but mostly illicit drugs and fraudulent documentation such as passports being mostly anonymous, Bitcoin, among other cryptocurrencies was instrumental in allowing Silk Road and any anonymous marketplace to run. Ross overbridge was arrested in 2013 and charged in a high profile case with money laundering computer hacking, conspiracy to traffic narcotics, and arranging hitmen to murder six people. However, he was not prosecuted for the attempted murder charges.

In October last year, the FBI swooped on Ross Ulbricht was sitting at his laptop in the science fiction section of a San Francisco library. But to ensure they got the evidence they wanted, the federal agents had to grab or write before he had time to shut down his computer.

My prosecutors in the case essentially wanted him online, and the computer unencrypted at his arrest.

He was sentenced to double life in prison, plus 40 years without parole. In total, approximately 170,000 bitcoins were seized by the US government from Silk Road and over to his personal account. At the time, this was roughly 100 million US dollars. 

You sold at the peak of bitcoins price in 2017, it will be worth approximately 2.8 billion US dollars. Ross overbridge had a staunch libertarian philosophy, believing that he was doing an ultimate good for the world. His rules for Silk Road outlined that only products that do not cause harm to innocent people may be listed. He fundamentally believed that he was giving power to the people against the government. 

It could be argued that the site reduces violence in society as the Silk Road provided a means to purchase narcotics without the violent nature of cartels, gangs or local drug dealers. Ross orbiter's heavy prosecution has caused a stir in the online community. There have been arguments about how much of the silk road was built by Aldridge as he had limited programming knowledge. 

Some claim that this was the work of a group. new versions of silk road and other drug marketplaces keep reappearing. Perhaps as long as there is demand, there will always be another form of silk road. Tall and the dark web have also 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 serve. 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 by accident may even be a criminal offence. 

To make things clear, it's definitely recommended that you don't mess with the dark web. There have been reports of people getting strange phone calls after browsing through forums, people's webcams being hacked and then being put on live stream for all to see people being followed around in public and being horrified to see photos of themselves while doing their day. 

The activities appear on their computer later that day. A lot of people regard the dark web as an underworld, an illegal and dark place where criminals mate. There is a lot of this type of activity. But the other argument is that it gives people freedom. It can stop governments from overreaching their boundaries, it can keep people and their ideas safe. 

The question is, how do we stop the parts of the dark web that shouldn't exist? Right now? It seems like an unanswerable question. But people such as Tor staff are working on it. In a time where all of our information is online, and our identity follows us on every post and search, perhaps we need something like a dark web in order to keep our freedom. 

So I'll pass the question off to you. Do you think we need something like a dark web for privacy reasons? 

But on the other hand, it just might be the case in the future that intelligence agencies compromise the system without even telling us? 

It's an interesting debate.