The invisible part of Web where it is Deep and Dark !

Imagine an Ice Berg. What you find above the water level is only a smaller portion of the whole Ice Berg. The major part is under water. If we consider what we see above water level as the surface web (the part of web we use regularly), what remains under water is the massive Deep Web. It is hidden from us !.

What is Deep Web?

The Deep Web or the invisible web is the part of World Wide Web whose contents are not indexed by the conventional search engines. Search engines rely on pages that contain links to find and identify content. This may be a great way for finding new content on the web that most of the people generally care about (blogs, news, etc.). However, this technique of navigating links also misses a lot of content.

There can be various reasons for not indexing web contents. The content may be commercial, in which case the contents are behind a member wall and only paid customers can access that. Or perhaps the content may contain personal information and only those who have access privileges can access that.

Imaging that you want to access some documents from an online student management system where you don’t have links to those documents. Then you will definitely need a search box to obtain these results. The results of this search are perfect examples of Deep Web content. Google search can’t find the pages behind these website search boxes. Thus, most of the content located in the Deep Web exists in these websites that require a search and is not illegal and scary. However, if you go a little deeper in the Internet you’ll find the Dark Web.

How Dark Web differs from Deep Web?

The Dark Web is a small portion of the Deep Web that has been intentionally hidden and is inaccessible through conventional web browsers. You will need special software, configurations or authorization to access these content. Dark Web is established using small peer-to-peer networks or large, popular networks like Tor, Freenet or I2P. The top level domain of the Tor Dark Web is .onion. Because of this, Tor is also known as the Onionland. These networks use a traffic anonymization technique known as onion routing. Dark web sites also use a scrambled naming structure that creates URLs that are often impossible to remember (Ex: eajwlvm3z2lcca76.onion).

What is down there?

Dark Web contains marketplaces that allows to buy weapons, drugs, credit card numbers, stolen subscription credentials, pirated music and films, hacked accounts or things that you cannot buy anywhere else. The commerce sites in the Dark Web use cryptocurrency (Ex: bitcoin) for transactions. This allows the two parties to conduct a trusted transaction without knowing each other’s identity.

Although contents in the Dark Web are illegal, there is also a brighter side of this network. The Tor network began as an anonymous communications channel, and it still serves a valuable purpose in helping people communicate in environments that are hostile to free speech. For example, in countries facing dictatorship or eavesdropping people use dark web to communicate with other countries. You can get all about privacy protection, cryptocurrency, political news, rare books, Wikileaks and more. Many mainstream media organizations monitor whistleblower sites in the Dark Web looking for news.

How do we access the Dark Web?

As mentioned above the conventional browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox etc cannot be used to access Dark Web content. Instead, you will need special software. The Tor browser is such a software. Follow this link, download the Tor browser bundle and extract to a location. Open the folder, click “Start Tor Browser” and start browsing the Dark Web.

Tor routes your web page requests through a series of proxy servers operated by thousands of volunteers around the globe, rendering your IP address unidentifiable and untraceable. However, it is also unreliable and very slow. Unlike in the conventional web browsers like Google Chrome or Firefox, browsing in Tor may not return the appropriate results. Instead, most often the results are repetitive and often irrelevant to the query.

Is it safe out there?

Considering that Dark Web has a brighter side, it is not totally illegal to go into it. However, it is illegal to look at things like rape, child pornography, extreme real violent acts and curiosity is not an excuse.

The anonymous nature of the Tor network also makes it especially vulnerable to distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS). You will not be safe from the attackers or hackers. Therefore, never use your real email or your real name. If you get into a commercial site, never pay in credit card, use cryptocurrency. If you ever want to download something, do not download without scanning (use VirusTotal). Most importantly use your common sense. If you live somewhere connecting to Tor might cause problems for you, consider connecting to Tor via a “bridge“. Also you can connect to a VPN before connecting to Tor in order to further hide your traffic.