The Dark Web: The Unseen Side of the Internet 9788835360933, 8835360935

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The Dark Web The Unseen Side of the Internet By A. J. Wright

The Dark Web The Unseen Side of the Internet

Author: A. J. Wright Copyright © AB Prominent Publisher 9788835360933

Published in the United States

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Table of Contents How the Internet Changed Everything

Web Levels The Surface Web

The Deep Web

The Dark Web Should You Access the Dark Web?

The Onion Routing

The Darknets & Tor Network

The Hidden Wiki

The Silk Road

Bitcoin & Ross William Ulbricht How the Dark Web Affects You

Botnets

Data Breaches

Hitmen Services

Human Organ Trafficking & Child Pornography

The Cybercrime Challenge

Can You Know Users of the Dark Web? Facts & Figures of the Dark Web

Positive Effects of the Dark Web Is the Dark Web a Terrible or Good Place?

10 Smart Ways to Keep your Internet Identity Safe on Daily Basis

How the Internet Changed Everything

Everything has been changed by the internet: the way we work, the way we live and even the way we play. Everyone has a corner on the internet. Whatever your interests or beliefs, there's something or someone out there that thinks the same way you do.

The world wide web has connected us in ways that we never before imagined. It's now a place where just about anyone from anywhere on the planet can come together. The internet has so much stuff that most of it we don't even know exists.

If there’s something or anything you want - a product or service, whether it be legal or illegal, moral or immoral - the internet has it. You can decide to use it for good or bad.

Web Levels

There are various levels of deep web. For instance, the lowest level (level 1) is called the surface web and is generally comprised of the “open to public” part of the web. The upper most level (level 5) is known as the dark web which is not accessible by normal web browsers and needs to get The Onion Router network or some other private networks. The following table gives a brief summary of the level of dark web:

For simplicity, you can break down the internet into three separate categories.

The Surface Web

The surface web is the first category. It is everything we use on a daily basis: Facebook, Youtube, Twitter or any other social media at all. It's just a part of what is called the worldwide web. The surface web is a relatively easy place to find anything because nearly everything is indexed by search engines like Yahoo and Google.

In every second over a thousand photos are posted on Instagram. Eight thousand tweets are posted on Twitter and seventy thousand searches are made on Google. Almost a hundred thousand videos are watched on Youtube. So, it seems the surface web is massive, and it definitely is.

Using the search traffic, nearly everything we do can be found. For example, you can look up people and dig out some kind of information about them and even their life. However, what you can not find are information like their medical records and bank accounts. Such information is actually hidden inside passwordprotected websites where only those people can access them. This is some of what we’ve all been through inside the deep web, isn’t it?

The Deep Web

In the deep web live contents that are not indexed by search engines. It is the large part of the internet that is inaccessible to conventional search engines and is known as the invisible web. Everyone who uses the web virtually visits deep websites on a daily basis without being aware.

Basically, if you can't find something on Google, then it's technically on the deep web. It’s very likely you've logged into an email before. So you've browsed the deep web technically.

I think you may be a little disappointed to hear that the deep web is not as cool as it sounds. It's pretty much like the surface web, only a bit more secrecy. But what you might not realize is

that the deep web is the most massive part of the internet. Here’s why.

Ninety-six percent of everything on the internet lives in the deep web. This means that even if you go online daily and open new websites for the next fifty years, you wouldn't even touch one percent of the vast amount of information on the internet. There's just too much for you to go through, and most of it you couldn't even get access to.

The deep web is the anonymous internet where it is much difficult for hackers, spies, or government agencies to track internet users and have a look on which websites they are using and what they are doing there.

The Dark Web

Even deeper and further than the deep web, in the tiniest sliver of the internet, lies a part of the web where things don't leave.

Here you’ll find websites that are encrypted mainly for the purpose of hiding their existence. There are sites purposely created with no IP addresses so as to make them nearly unrecognizable. These sites are only accessed by users who use encrypted software to completely mask their identities. So welcome to the dark web! Here, everything and anything goes.

Now that you've reached the dark web you may want to ask how does it even work? Just like the surface web that everyone uses every single day, the dark web contains a lot of forums, websites and services that we can use, but they are protected. They’re hidden under a surface where dark activities are concealed from the rest of the world.

The dark web is very deep and is the safe haven for many illegal online activities. It’s much deeper than you can imagine. The dark web is a place where predators, criminals, drug addicts, spies, and even human traffickers hide from plain sight. You could access the dark web in minutes if you wanted to, but the question is, should you?

Should You Access the Dark Web?

There are chances the FBI man is watching you if you're browsing the surface web. Maybe not really, but everything the average person does online can be tracked in various ways. A lot of websites do track what you're looking at or searching, and, in turn, advertise services or products that fit that description to you.

This is far from something new. Ecommerce sites, Google, Facebook, and many other social media sites are very guilty of this. They sell our data to advertisers all around the world because we agreed to it in their terms and conditions we did not read. This does not happen by accident and is not a coincidence either.

The internet was never made to be anonymous. There are some people who see this as a kind of invasion of privacy. But there are others who don't see a problem at all with it. The question is how far should we let this go before it turns really bad?

It may sound funny but the United States government too thought this over twenty years ago. The US government was looking for a system that could protect their communications while online. Because the internet was not designed for everything and everyone to remain anonymous, somehow anybody could intercept a government transmission while it was being relayed, and this was not acceptable. Therefore, in the mid nineties some researchers at the US Naval research laboratory started working on something.

The Onion Routing

It is called the onion

Onion routing is used to protect any transmitted data by essentially placing it inside multiple layers of encryption, in such a way that the inner most layer holds the original message. You can look at it this way.

Let's say a message needs to be sent from the source to a destination, and that for it to get across to the destination, it has to go through three midpoints B and The message is then wrapped securely in 3 layers of encryption.

Each of these layers only knows the source of the message and the destination to send it next. It knows nothing else. Therefore, the message, or the data, that was sent originally remains hidden.

At every midpoint B or a layer of encryption is stripped and the new layers of information tell it where next to send the message to.

After the message has traveled through all the midpoints, the final layer is stripped and the message eventually revealed.

This kind of encryption is used to send data to and from multiple places without it being vulnerable to any interception in between. In other words, there’s no one else who can see it. It’s only those who are supposed to.

The Darknets & Tor Network

Darknet (or dark net) is synonymous with the dark web. it is a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content. The dark net is hidden from users who surf with normal or standard browsers. It also hides web addresses and server locations. The following table shows the difference between surface web, deep web, dark web, and dark net.

Dark nets like Tor use the onion routing. Dark nets operate alongside other networks on the internet but they require certain

software to access.

Tor is an acronym for It's a software named after the technology that is used to create it. It looks pretty much like any other common web browser. However, through Tor and other similar darknets, you can access webpages that are normally not made available to the general public.

Tor is a key enabler of anonymity in communication. Originally launched in 2002 it has undergone rigorous development over the years. The software is based on Mozilla Firefox and has been imitating Mozilla’s user interface ever since. It has gained popularity with the rise of darknet stores that have gained fame

due to the nature of illegal activities that they have been carrying out, such as the sale of drugs.

Tor is capable of directing traffic through a special network established and run by volunteers. Traffic flowing through Tor passes through 7,000 relays (layers of encryptions) which effectively conceal the destination location. Therefore, it is hard for the users on this network to be individually identified through traffic analysis since the chain is very long. Tor users’ activities, such as websites they are visiting, posts they make, messages they send and receive cannot be traced back to them. This makes Tor a safe haven for people that have something to hide.

There are also very many users of Tor that use it for the legitimate purposes that it was created for. In this chapter I will do an in-depth discussion of Tor.

The requirements and tools you need to access the dark web are enough to attract different kinds of people from all around the globe. Page links don't look like youtube.com, nether do they look familiar in any way whatsoever. Rather, they just look like some random strings of characters. They don’t end in the dot com or dot org you’re very familiar with. Instead they end in dot onion. You cannot access these websites with any of the traditional web browsers like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. It will never work. But if you use Tor, it will.

The primary intention of the Tor network was to protect user privacy. Tor came in as a welcome solution for those that had privacy concerns that their internet activities would be monitored. Tor was thought to establish freedom on the internet. Though it has successfully established that freedom, this achievement has not come without some major downsides. It created a room for another set of evils to be committed under the veil of anonymity. Tor also has some limitations. The network can conceal the footprints of a user’s internet activity. However, its unique traffic relaying system makes it easy for online services to determine that a user is accessing them from Tor. There are some websites that have restrictions on access via Tor. Tor developers have not concentrated on implementing features in the software to prevent websites from determining when they have been accessed via Tor.

Tor’s routing mechanism is complex. It implements encryption on the application layer of the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection)

model. The data encrypted includes that of the IP address of the device that packets are destined for. This data, which is essential for the flow of traffic, is encrypted a number of times and then sent through a virtual circuit. The circuit is made up of multiple Tor relays that are laid in succession. When a relay receives traffic, it will decrypt one layer just to find out the next relay so that it can pass the encrypted data to it. When data gets to the last relay, which could be the 7,000th relay that the data will pass through, the data is decrypted and then sent to the destination IP address without showing the source IP address. In short, for every data packet, Tor will strip out part of the packet’s header that contains information about the source. This packet is then encrypted and entered into the overlay network. The packet is then moved around the Tor servers commonly known as relays till it reaches its destination. The destination does not know the source of the packet; therefore, if intercepted, no meaningful information about the path used will be discovered.

That is the dark web for you or at least your first step into it.

The Hidden Wiki

This is the hidden Wiki. It contains several hundreds of various hidden services available on the dark web. It’s easy to find fake passports and US driver's licenses. You can find drugs and illegal weapons. They are all here.

And you’re barely scratching the surface. Very much like on the surface web, there are extremely popular marketplaces on the dark web. Here you can get things that you may struggle to buy elsewhere, such as rocket launchers.

Of course, I’m strongly against doing anything like this. However, supposing you wanted to buy things from websites on the dark web, here's how you would do it. The traditional forms of payment make no sense on the dark web. I mean things like credit cards can easily be tracked, thereby removing the anonymity of things, which might put you in jail. Therefore, virtual currency becomes King. This is where Bitcoin comes in.

Because of Bitcoin's almost anonymous nature, it has been used alongside couple other cryptocurrencies as a pivot for running any anonymous marketplace. To have your anonymous currency just create a Bitcoin wallet. Then exchange some of your cash for Bitcoins. Then you can do nearly anything you want with it. One of the first things that comes to anyone’s mind from the dark web are the vast number of sites that sell illegal drugs and other similar items. Yes, they are real!

The Silk Road

For example, in 2011 a darknet market known as the Silk Road opened for business. Since then, it became nearly synonymous with the dark web. You could purchase many illegal drugs you want there. Many sellers from every corner of the world sold things like weed, cocaine, LSD and DMT. If you don’t want to buy drugs you can buy things like counterfeit cash, guns, some clothes and books as well. Unfortunately, after only 2 years it started operating, Silk Road’s site was seized by the FBI. It was taken down in October of 2013.

But over the course of just these two years (from 2011 to 2013), Silk Road made over 9.5 million Bitcoins in revenue.

Now let’s deviate from this a little bit. If you sold these Bitcoin when it was at its peak price in 2017 (that is roughly USD20,000,

Silk Road’s total revenue would be over USD186 billion, in just 2 years. So, Silk Road and other similar dark web markets really played a big role in making Bitcoin rise to the point it is today.

Note that in 2011 when was Silk Road was created, bitcoin was worth less than a dollar However, because the dark web pretty much required decentralized cryptocurrency, bitcoin was the perfect choice.

Bitcoin & Ross William Ulbricht

Honestly speaking, Bitcoin wouldn't have reached this point today without a bit of such illegal activity. Ross William the man who created the darknet, was found and apprehended in 2013 and so the site was ultimately taken down.

Ross was given 2 life sentences in addition to 40 years in prison without even a chance for parole.

Sincerely I find activities going people make it were also shut

this so unfair. Although there are many illicit on in the dark web, it's not as massive as many out to be. There are many larger services that down by the FBI or even a local government.

However, where ever there's demand, inevitably supply will show. When one site is shut down, 5 new ones open up to fill the space.

For example, after Silk Road was taken down, Silk Road 2.0 opened up. Silk Road 2.0 was also taken down less than a year later. Shortly after that, Silk Road 3.0 was launched. It’s funny but this has continued year after year. There are many administrators and creators of these sites that were also found and convicted of crimes similar to that Ross

Ulbricht was guilty of. Surprisingly, instead of giving all of them life in prison, their sentences were very much shorter.

For example, the largest seller on Silk Road was sentenced to only 10 years in prison. The person who created Silk Road 2.0 was sentenced to a little more than 5 years in prison for creating the exact same thing that got Ross Ulbricht 2 life sentences in jail. Almost everyone else having a connection to any of those sites was sentenced to a maximum of a ten years in prison.

How the Dark Web Affects You

The dark web affects you, even if you have never visited it, or even if you did not know it existed. Data breaches and leaks are pretty common these days. If you have some data stored in the database of a company and it was compromised, there are great chances it could be sold somewhere on the dark web where anyone who has access to it can purchase it.

If you are in the dark web and don't know what to buy with your money yet, listen to me. Social security numbers (SSN) can be sold for as little as USD0.99. As you may have known, SSN is a number given to every single citizen of the united states but it can be used to steal another person’s identity.

Botnets

Botnets are also very inexpensive. For under USD5 an hour, you can use DDoS (an acronym for to attack and essentially take nearly any service or website offline for some time. Botnets are often used to disrupt businesses and can severely affect people being targeted. Have you ever played video games online before? Then this has probably been done to you.

Data Breaches

For as little as USD50, you can easily buy someone's medical records. You can also buy stolen credit cards as well. Just buy one, rack up the bill and then never pay it. Much of the data in the dark web are not even for sale. They’re just out there for free.

It’s easy to find websites that leak the information of celebrities, politicians, and even normal people like me and you, and there's little or nothing we can really do about it. These days it’s gotten even much worse than this because there are other weird and darker things that go on the dark web.

Hitmen Services

There are many hitmen services that claim they can kill just anyone on earth for as low as USD5,000.

Although most of these are revealed to be scams, but certainly not all of them. Even if you dismiss these as mere scams, the fact that there are people on the dark web who trust random individuals to execute real murders remains a concerning subject to say the least.

Human Organ Trafficking & Child Pornography

The dark web also has various services that sell real human organs. We may not know how they acquired these, but certainly if you need one, they're there on the dark web.

Unfortunately, child pornography is a bigger part of this scheme than I want to admit.

Sites like Lolita City and Playpen have now been taken down, but during the peaks of their operation they had over 201,000 users.

There are still similar forms of these sites in existence that have various ways of abducting young children from different cities of the world.

On the dark web there are various discussions on how to hide these children, the kind of kids they wanted or owned, and even darker discussions like what they would do to them when there’s no one else around.

This is just a small look into this dark and deep corner of the internet. Since there are no rules here anything can exist. The deeper you go into the ugly dark web, the scarier things you'll discover, and you will often be very surprised when you learn the reputation the dark web has.

The Cybercrime Challenge

In the dark web, security is crucial because it is used to build confidence and security in the use of information technologies in order to ensure trust by the information society. If there’s no security in the cyberspace confidence will be undermined in the information society. That is why there are so many intrusions around the world which results in stealing of assets, money, sensitive military, economic and commercial information. With information cutting across boundaries of various legal systems connected to different networks around the world, we have a growing need to protect personal information, assets, funds, as well as national security. For this reason, both the public and private sectors are gaining interest in cybersecurity.

With the emerging applications of computer and IT, cybercrime is now a great challenge all over the globe. Many cybercriminals everyday try attack computer systems to illegally access them.

Thousands of new spam and computer viruses are released every month and used to damage many computer systems, steal or destroy their data. These threats are expensive, both in terms of quality and quantity.

Recently, system experts have become more concerned about the protection of computer and communication systems from these growing cyberattacks. We have also seen deliberate attempts by unauthorized persons to access the computer systems with the goal of stealing crucial data, make illegal financial transfers, and to disrupt, damage, manipulate data or execute any other unlawful actions.

As computer security has advanced, maintaining network persistence has grown harder. As per Australian Cyber Security Centre report, the culture has adapted to this environment, focusing on low-risk, high-reward targets to achieve their goals, with a focus on the development of social engineering methodologies to implement new attacks. It is the ubiquitous nature of the internet that has allowed these nefarious individuals to gain increasingly detailed profiles of individuals through exploitation and analysis of their digital footprints. This has resulted in higher rates of spear-phishing attacks, identity theft and fraud, and the development of highly specialized malware tools. There are many risks and pitfalls in cybersecurity incident that can seriously affect computer and network systems. It can be due to improper cybersecurity controls, man-made or natural disasters, or malicious users.

Can You Know Users of the Dark Web?

Many people who have been arrested and jailed for illegal activities they carried out on the dark web don't even look physically threatening in any way. When you see any of them you can’t know, because they don’t look at all like someone who can run a drug empire online or hire a hitman for a couple of Bitcoin without ever getting in danger for they don’t have to be.

They just look like normal people you could see walking down the street every day or lining up behind you at a grocery store. Because they look just like normal people, you wouldn't ever suspect them or know the crimes they're a part of just by looking at them.

Facts & Figures of the Dark Web

The dark web is the largest criminal underground where so many of the worst people in our society hide.

Believe it or not, this is not far from true. There are claims out there that there is about 3000 to 12,000 of these weird and hidden websites on the dark web and slightly over half of them are being deemed illicit content.

Well, you may not take these figures as fact because, by design, hidden services are meant to be hidden. Out of these 3000 to 12,000 websites, slightly less than 6% of people who use Tor really use their hidden services. Out of the billions of people who use the internet, about 105,000 use the dark web. Out of the billions of websites in existence, a few thousand of them are deemed illicit. This certainly is just a drop of water in the ocean but you should not be surprised that this is also why not everybody in the world is really as genuine as they may look. Well, that's the gamble you take. That's the price you pay for this. Even though there are dark parts of the web in existence, there are other parts that exist just to help the rest of the world. There are also many countries around the globe that sensor internet content they deem to be obscene, such as higher powers like the governments.

Positive Effects of the Dark Web

First, because the dark web provides a safe haven with no kind of censorship whatsoever, it reveals the truth in several situations that people otherwise would never have seen. It provides people the chance and convenience to truly speak about and report on things that are crucial without fearing any kind of censorship or even physical threats.

Furthermore, there are many large news networks that open and operate dark web services for normal people to come forward and give information without the fear of arrest or any kind of public ridicules.

Sincerely speaking, all of us put our entire lives on the internet at this point.

Some 10 to 15 years ago, this would have looked frankly stupid or absurd, but now it looks pretty normal. Somehow, we're gradually giving up internet privacy, but the dark web provides it in a way. If you will agree with me, it kind of gives us an easy way to take our anonymity and privacy back. However, it is up to us to use it in a positive or negative way.

Another positive effect I find is that the drugs that are sold on the dark web, although most of them are illegal, can have some positive uses. For example, if they are not sold where you live, you could purchase them on the dark web.

Although the FBI governments and a lot of other people still believe Silk Road had immensely negative effects on us, Russell William Ulbricht thought otherwise. He said he was doing the world a service.

To reduce the violence that results from the dealing and trading of illegal drugs, Russell provided a safer and more genuine experience.

According to Russell, Silk Road brought opportunity to the masses and protected them, not actually putting them at risk. However, despite his apparent non-harming and peaceful nature, Russell Ulbricht was one of the people who actually used those hitmen services on the dark web in his attempts to kill 6 different people.

Is the Dark Web a Terrible or Good Place?

Personally, I believe it all depends on how you view it and interpret it. The dark web does not have to be a terrible place. It can be a good place for you if you would not go there to look for things you should not or don't want to see. You can't necessarily get rid of such things, but you can avoid them. There are certain things an average or a normal person just shouldn't see.

So, if you don't want to be a victim of this, please stay away from the dark web.

10 Smart Ways to Keep your Internet Identity Safe on Daily Basis

Use the following tips to keep your identity safe on daily basis: Make it hard for other people to get credit in your name. Put strong passwords on all of your mobile phone and other devices. Set up two-factor authentication on your email and financial accounts. Don't do any online banking or shopping at a local café Install antimalware protection on all your devices Update the operating systems and other software on your devices regularly Automate your software updates Don't give out personal information through text, email or on your phone Be very attentive and careful when clicking links or opening email attachments Encrypt and backup your data

Whether you believe or not that the dark web is as bad as people made it out to be, or if today is the first time you're hearing about it, I strongly advise you don't get yourself in it. That’s because you may not know what you're getting into and because once you're in, you don’t want to leave.

Link to all images in this book

If you’re experiencing issues viewing any of the images in this book, you can download it.

Here’s the link to all images in this book:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bnmd1w1ze2rh9oe/AADQmqpfsPQMP9a asSvGwhaAa?dl=0

A. J. Wright

[email protected]