Before we dive deeper into the world of Dark Web, let's understand the break down of Intenet itself. So, the internet is divided into three main parts namely Surface web, Deep web, and Dark web. The surface web is that portion of the internet that can be accessed by a google search. A search engine has a crawler and it keeps looking for all the new websites and data and keeps updating itself. If a crawler can't access a piece of website or data, that means it will never show up on google search. The surface web basically shows you all the indexed websites. All the common search engines are designed only to access the surface web. The surface web is around 4% of the entire internet. The surface web mostly hosts data that is legal, except for a few torrents and other sites. The largest portion of the internet is formed by the Deep web, it covers more than 85% of the total internet, it's formed by a barrage of unindexed pages. Deep web consists of data like bank records, legal documents, subscriptions, social media data and a lot more. In simpler terms, Deep web data is mainly accessible through some kind of password or sign-in feature. Until and unless you provide the password, it's very unlikely to get access to the data present in the Deep web. Deep web forms the basis of businesses like banking, trading, and many more. Without the deep web, it's almost impossible to run a state or a country. The only alternative to the Deep web is to write everything on paper, just like medieval times. And the last bit of the internet is formed by the Dark web, it has its pros and cons and we'll also look into why it was created in the first place? What it provides you with that other two parts of the internet can't?
How it all began? Even before the internet came into existence, the first online deal that was made via computers by sending a message was a drug deal between the two students of MIT and Stanford. Ever since the inception of the internet, people have been using it to do all kinds of illegal activities. Countries, where laws related to digital information, piracy, and anonymity are not very clear, became the haven for hosting illegal websites. From the early days of the internet, illegal activities have been present and till date, we haven't found any real solution to that. It may seem that the Dark web must have been invented by someone who wanted to defraud the government institutions but quite the contrary it was invented by the US government itself. US naval research laboratory laid the foundation of a special browser called TOR (The Onion Router) that is capable of accessing all the illegal websites of Dark Web. It is named 'Onion Router' because this browser puts several layers between the requesting host and the destination server thus giving anonymity over the internet. Using TOR makes it extremely tough to identify who requested what data from which IP. The sole purpose behind the creation of TOR was to give anonymity over the internet. TOR was released to the public in 2002, which was back then being developed by DARPA. To this day, US government funds the development of TOR. But Why create this in the first place? It was created so that intelligence agencies can use it for their own internal purposes and to catch the bad guys, they use the Dark web to create fake websites that help them catch drug dealers, people selling girls, and every other criminal present on the internet. But why open it to the public? If it was not opened to the public, everyone could've known that these websites are being hosted by some government agency just to catch them. The only way to hide on the internet was to hide among all the other anonymous users thus it was opened to public usage. The more the number of users are more the anonymity will be. One more thing, people sometimes misunderstand that Dark web is TOR, it's not. TOR is a medium to access the dark web, just like chrome is to access the surface web. All three parts of the internet exist without any browser also. The only thing which changes is the way to access them.
To give you an idea of how big Deep and Dark web really are, 60 websites alone on these two parts of the internet are 40 times the entire surface web. Online drug dealing websites are the biggest part of the Dark web, you can buy all the narcotics drugs from LSD, heroin, psychedelics drugs to anything you want. There are a ton of websites present on Dark web just to scam people. A website named "Besa Mafia" was listed as a website for contract killings, but later it was found out that it was nothing more than a scam. This website was fake doesn't mean that these kinds of sites are not actually present there. If you look hard enough you can buy anything from an AK-47 to a rocket launcher. Stolen identity and fake legal documents like passport are on the grab on Dark Web. People have hired hackers to change their grades by hacking universities servers. Passwords for individual bank accounts can be bought for something like $160 and full identity for $1200. The most infamous marketplace on the Dark web is called 'Silk Road' it sells every drug known to mankind along with fake ID's. Cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is essential to trade in such places, paper money can't be used for all these activities as it is very easy to track because of its serial number and bank transfer is a straight NO. Here is a sample of a webpage from the Dark Web, it's Dark web's Hidden Wikipedia, this page lists all the major websites providing all kinds of illegal services. Silk Road website was operational since 2011 and it generated a revenue of $1.2 billion. Later, when its founder was caught, bitcoin worth more than $2 billion was seized from his account.
When silk road founder was caught, huge attention to Dark web was brought in to the people by mainstream media and as a result, the number of Dark web users grew rapidly. The below graph shows the change in users after the Silk Road scandal A few days later Silk road 2 came into existence and again it was shut down by the intelligence agencies. No matter how hard these agencies try, these websites keep popping just like torrent websites. It is also alleged that the kingpin of Silk Road 'Ross Ulbricht' also hired a hitman off the Dark web to kill 6 people.
The Dark Web is filled with all kinds of gruesome activities from murder to rapes, from child pornography to animal killings. A site named "Lolita city" was recently brought down, it contained over 100 GB of child pornography and had around 1500 users. Another website called "Playpen" was brought down in 2015 that had over 200000 people registered for watching child pornography. Supposedly, there are sites called Red rooms, people are tortured and killed in a live stream, users can also give instructions to torture the person in a particular way. There is no proper evidence whether this type of website exists or not, but myth regarding this certainly persists.
This image shows the report of a survey that was conducted in 2016 to identify and count the number of illegal active websites present on the Dark Web. You may think that all the people who use TOR are involved in some kind of illicit activity, but this is not true, only 3-6% of TOR users use these hidden illicit services. Most of the people use TOR just to anonymously surf the Web. Most of the people using this anonymous system are using it as a tool to be anonymous, privacy to these people is granted by the constitution itself. So, how do you stop the criminals from using it? The answer is, there is no real way to stop them, until and unless the US government itself stops using this system, illegal sites will keep popping no matter how many times you shut them down.
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