The Dark Web

First off, what even is the dark web and why should you care about it? Think of the regular Internet. Think of what Google does for the Internet – they index the entire thing to make it easy for you to find things based on searching for whatever you want. The dark web is a part of the Internet that isn’t indexed by search engines. The dark web consists of thousands of websites that are often nefarious. A large portion of them is hosting illicit material. These may include selling breached information like credit cards, social security numbers, medical information, you name it. Dark web sites can also be a means for bad actors to buy and sell drugs, guns, counterfeit money, stolen subscription credentials, hacked Netflix accounts, bank account credits and numbers, you name it. It isn’t out of the question to find and hire hackers or other bad actors to conduct illegal activity you specify. It can be a scary place.

The dark web isn’t 100% a bad place. There are sub-groups that organize to build social clubs like a chess club or book club. Some people find it re-assurance that by using the dark web, their digital persona is masked and can be kept more private.

The Deep Web and The Dark Web

You’ve probably heard both terms Deep and Dark Web, so what the difference? Deep web tends to have a slightly different meaning in that it IS accessible by Google; however, it includes things that are behind signed in credentials or have blocked content from web crawlers making it harder to index. Examples may include membership websites once you’re signed in or confidential company websites that aren’t on the public internet. The deep web is estimated to be an overwhelming majority of the Internet where some say it’s over 95% of the Internet. Meaning as consumers, we only know a very little piece of what all is going on out there!

Be More Specific – What’s Out There in The Dark Web?

Generally, the stuff on the dark web is broken into categories.

1. Intellectual Property Theft.
2. Malware, Ransomware, Viruses, and Code that can be used to take down a business.
3. Information included customer information, that can be used to harm a business’s reputation – most applicable to the consumer.

If you ever find that your information is found on the Dark Web with Dteckt’s service, follow the steps on the Identity Theft and Data Breach Recovery pages.

Can Anyone Access the Dark Web?  

Yes, and it’s very easy to do for anyone with a computer. You can be on and browsing around the dark web in a matter of minutes. The harder part becomes knowing where to go once you’re on the dark web. Remember from before that the dark web isn’t indexed. That basically means there’s no google.com or bing.com you can go to to start searching around. You need to know exactly how to access the content. There are some out there that try to index but it continues to prove to be a challenge.

The major difference that you would notice is that .com (and other well-known domains .co, .edu, .gov, .io etc.) aren’t on the dark web. You would notice .onion instead, darkwebsite456788162165874.onion for example, and those would only be accessible if you’re accessing the dark web through the right method. Be advised though, the randomness of the .onion sites update frequently to keep law enforcement and regular Internet users out.

Ecommerce and the Dark Web

Bitcoin is largely what made Ecommerce so big on the dark web because bitcoin enables two parties to transact without knowing each anything about the other. Bitcoin is almost exclusively the type of currency used on the dark web. The anonymous nature of bitcoin makes it very appealing as most of the transactions are illegal. You would be very interested to see that the marketplaces, ratings/review systems, shopping carts, forums are pretty likewhat you’re used to on the regular Internet. As you would suspect, you wouldn’t want to trust the reviews as much as you would for say, Amazon.

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