THE DARK SIDE OF INTERNET

DEEP WEB – THE DARK SIDE OF INTERNET

Well, most of you might be wondering after reading the title of this article, so firstly let me tell you this. Today I am going to give an introduction to the dark side of internet where there lies no rules, no law enforcement and complete access to the information that is not known to most of the people. We live in a society where people believe that if there is no answer provided by Google then it might have never existed, but what if I tell you that the internet what you see is just 1% of the actual web. There lays information hidden to people, which is nearly 10,000 terabytes, which is 500 times larger than the web we see (Surface web). The figures are taken from a research conducted Bergman in 2001. Currently the deep web is much wider than the figures above.

In this article I will be discussing the truth behind the Dark Web. It is also known as the Invisible Web or Hidden Web. But before exploring into all of that, let me make you familiar with how it all started and reached this stage in brief.

It was around in 1970’s when Internet got accepted widely across the globe. Web services like Archie and Gopher started in 1990’s. These were the search engines which listed FTP links to the documents related to certain topics. Around in 1990 the Word Wide Web (WWW) was invented, which was the graphical interface to the internet. There are other interfaces to internet such as Email, Telnet and FTP etc.  In the year 1991 the WAIS was created, it was the search engine. In 1993, a web browser called Mosaic released and substantially web crawlers like Yahoo and Lycos were created. Google and Invisible Web were created in the year 1998.

The D.W. consists of millions of databases containing filthy information. These webpages are not indexed by standard search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. If you try to access a webpage that belongs to D.W. then you need a special type of browser, The Onion Routing (TOR) browser.

The TOR browser provides a special type of routing and hence giving you a complete anonymity. Even though sometimes there is a chance to get compromised with the anonymity, you are most likely to be on safe side if you are using a Virtual Private Network or VPN simultaneously.

It is the world of cyber criminals and the world for illegal activities. So now you might be questioning, what goes over there??? I would probably answer you this way, everything that is illegal. Stuff like gambling, dealing of drugs, child p0rnography, weap0ns smuggIing, kiIIers for hire, international terr0rism, hackers for hire and other information such as b0mb making, government leaked documents, source codes of malwares and Trojans etc.

According to Bergman’s research documents (2001), the Surface Web contains 1 billion documents and occupies a space of 20 terabytes whereas the D.W. contains 550 billion documents available with more than 200,000 databases. It contains quality information which is evaluated by experts. It is said that the content on WikiLeaks is taken from the Deep Web.

The D.W. follows a standard currency called BitCoins. The value of a BitCoin is nearly $12. You can gamble by playing poker and betting BitCoins. The transactions done here are anonymous, well, most of the time.

Hope that you enjoyed reading my article. Any questions, comments and views are most welcome.