Inside the Dark Web - PC Magazine
PC Magazine, By Max Eddy
If our popular culture is to be believed, most people assume there's a place online where the worst of the headlines you read about drugs, money laundering, murder for hire, and vast child pornography rings are born. It's called many things, though "Dark Web" is the most dramatic.
Although it's true that this Dark Web exists, it's much larger and more diverse than merely these illegal activities. What's more, the same technology that makes it possible for such marketplaces to operate in secret is also protecting political dissidents overseas and hiding everyday Internet traffic from surveillance. It may be that this digital back alley is the path toward a more secure Internet.
The World of Webs
Most people take the Internet at face value, but what most of us interact with is really just a slice of the information available called the Surface Web. To get to the Dark Web we have to go deeper, away from the world of standard Web addresses and onto the anonymity network called Tor. When you click on a link in Google, you're connected with the target information fairly directly. Someone accessing the same site while connected through Tor would have their request bounced randomly through volunteer computers called nodes before exiting Tor and arriving at the site, making their online movements much harder to track.
Tor can be used to access sites on the Surface Web, but servers can also be assigned special addresses that can only be reached within the Tor network. These are called hidden services, and when we're talking about the Dark Web, we're mostly talking about these sites. Of course, there are other services to hide online activity and even host hidden websites, but Tor is perhaps the most well known and well established.
Surprisingly, the onion routing protocol that powers Tor was originally developed by the U.S. Department of Defense. Tor is now a volunteer-run nonprofit operation, but it makes no secret of its roots. A page on Tor's history reads: "[Onion routing] was originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of protecting government communications. Today, it is used every day for a wide variety of purposes by normal people, the military, journalists, law enforcement officers, activists, and many others."
Among those "others" are some of the Internet's ne'er-do-wells. Some malware authors, for example, have used Tor to hide communication with their creations. The anonymization of the Tor network is also attractive for people carrying out illicit online activities, such as selling and purchasing illegal merchandise. When you read about illegal websites selling drugs, weapons, and child pornography, it's a safe bet that those websites are hosted within Tor.
The Bad Dark Web
"A few years ago, if you tried to browse the Internet through Tor, it would be a very slow and very painful experience," says Kaspersky researcher Stefan Tanase (pictured). As is often the case with digital security experts, speaking with Tanase and his fellow Kaspersky associate Sergey Lozhkin required a phone call from the PC Magazine office in New York to Bucharest and Moscow. That part of the world produces huge amounts of spam, malware, and cyberattacks, but just so happens to also produce some of the best minds in digital security in almost equal proportions. Read more.
