The Dark Web: Everything You Need To Know

The dark web consists of a decentralized network of internet sites that are designed to provide users with a high level of anonymity, by routing all their communications through multiple servers and the utilization of encryption methods.

How did the dark web come to be? 

The dark web has a negative connotation amongst the public due to its name sounding suspicious and it commonly being associated with criminal activity and with people who are trying to avoid the eyes of the authorities. Therefore it may be surprising to learn that the dark web was in fact conceived and prototyped by researchers in the US Naval Research Lab, individuals who had recognised the need for anonymity from the huge threat of being under surveillance when surfing the open internet. 

Building on work conducted by these scientists, the Tor Network was established in the year 2002, which made the dark web more accessible and available to the public. In the year 2008 the Tor Project released their browser, which was designed to improve the navigation of the dark web for the general public. 

What is Tor? 

The Tor Project, Inc. is a Seattle-based 501 research-education nonprofit organization founded by computer scientists Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson and five others. The Tor Project is primarily responsible for maintaining software for the Tor anonymity network. Tor stands for the onion router, onion routing is a technique for anonymous communication over a computer network. In an onion network, messages are encapsulated in layers of encryption, similar to the layers of an onion. The encrypted data is transmitted through a series of network nodes called onion routers, each of which "peels" away from a single layer, uncovering the data's next destination. When the final layer is decrypted, the message arrives at its destination.

To access the dark web an individual requires a special browser, the most common being the Tor browser. The Tor browser routes your web page requests through a series of proxy servers operated by thousands of volunteers around the globe, rendering an individual’s IP address unidentifiable and untraceable.

What kind of activities take place on the dark web? 

All kinds of Individuals use the dark web for a wide variety of reasons, a large group of individuals simply utilise the dark web over normal web browsing because of their strong belief in protecting their own privacy, choosing to do their browsing on a platform that prevents them from being watched. 

Some people who believe their government is tyrannical also choose to utilise the dark web to avoid their reach, for example in the year 2010 the Tor Network noticed that there was noticeable activity on their platform by activists who utilised the dark web during the uprisings that took place as part of the Arab Spring. The dark web is also utilised by Human rights organizations and journalists looking to create a safe space for whistleblowers to covertly share sensitive information, which is commonly done via SecureDrop which is a free software platform for secure communication. 

However the dark web is also home to a lot of criminal activity, in the year 2015, research was conducted by Daniel Moore and Thomas Rid of King’s College London, in which they investigated the contents of 2723 live websites on the dark web over a five week period. Their research concluded that a massive 57% of these sites hosted illicit material. This has only worsened, with a study in 2019 conducted by Dr Michael Mguire from the University Of Surrey concluding that the number of dark web listings that could harm an enterprise had risen by 20% since 2016. Through this study it was also discovered that from these web listings, around 60% could be harmful to enterprises. 

Dark web vs. Deep Web: What’s the difference? 

The deep web is commonly confused with the dark web, although similar, these terms are different. The deep web refers to any content on the internet that is not indexed by search engines, which makes the content inaccessible to the respective search engines, for example, content that lies behind a paywall or requires login credentials is considered to be a part of the deep web. It may be surprising to learn that anywhere between 96 to 99 percent of the internet is considered to be a part of the deep web, while what is accessible via a search engine is referred to as the clear or surface web. The dark web is considered to be a subset of the deep web and consists of content that is intentionally hidden and only accessible through a specific browser - Tor. 

So, Is the dark web illegal? 

Finally, the question that all of us have in mind is, Is the dark web illegal? Due to a large amount of nefarious and criminal activity on the dark web, there is a common misconception that everything that takes place on the dark web is illegal, but the opposite is true. 

The Tor Network was conceived with the purpose of helping people communicate in environments that are hostile to free speech, for example, several countries around the world have criminalized internet access, in these countries the dark web is a valuable tool for individuals to safely access the internet. The dark web also is used by a wide variety of organizations, law enforcement agencies around the world monitor the dark web for leaked or stolen data that may lead them to perpetrators, media organizations monitor the dark web for any whistleblowers who may be looking to divulge news anonymously. 

So is the dark web a threat to your organisation? Well, not unless your proprietary data is shared on the dark web. 

StickmanCyber can set up processes to conduct dark web monitoring, and discover any data breaches and instances of company data being available on the dark web, and prevent it from being leveraged by cyber criminals.