Many are the users who after watching a movie or series wonder what are the Dark Web and the Deep WebTerms that are sometimes confused, since both are part of the deep internet, the internet that is not accessible to everyone unless you have the right tools.
When I speak of tools, I am not referring to complex applications that only a few know how to use, but I am referring to web browsers. Yes, with just a browser (not all of them work), we can access the Dark Web, not the Deep Web. Below we explain the Differences between Dark Web, Deep Web, and Surface Web.
You could define the internet as the set of all the information that is available online, without leaving home. Within the internet, we would have to classify all the available content, since everything is publicly available: surface web y Deep Web.
surface web
On the one hand we find the information public and available to all users through a browser. This is known as surface-web. On the Surface Web are all the pages that its creators allow to be indexed through traditional search engines. The Surface Web represents about 4% of the internet.
Deep Web
On the other hand, we find the Deep Web. In the Deep Web you will find all the information that is not indexed by search engines but which can be accessed through certain web pages. The Deep Web represents 96% of the content available on the internet.
In the Deep Web you will find all the content that is not indexable in search engines as they are not public information, such as files hosted on storage services, emails, queries, data hosted on payment services such as Spotify, Netflix, newspaper pages with paywalls, queries that generate a web page with results ...
The Deep Web is also known as Invisible Web or Hidden Web, terms that describe how it works and what it represents. Within the Deep Web, is the Dark Web, a network that requires special browsers to be able to access the information it offers us
Dark Web
The dark web was created to share anonymous information and without any type of censorshipTherefore, in many cases it is used in countries where freedom of expression is not available and where censorship is part of everyday life.
Due to its privacy and anonymity features, it has become a haven for criminals and it seems that its use is only limited to this type of person.
The Dark Web is part of the Deep Web, hence we have included it in its section and not independently. Inside the Dark Web we find Darknets.
Darknets are a collection of specific networks that host certain pages that can only be accessed using certain browsers. Between the Best known darknets We found Bitnet (.bitnet), i2p (.i2p), Casipeanet (.opte.ga), Usenet (.uucp) and Tor (.onion).
Why can't I access the Dark Web from my browser
The web pages available on the Dark Web (Darknets) different domains use domains. In the case of the .onion domain, these web pages are only accessible through specific browsers such as Tor (one of the most popular) that use proxy programs to connect to anonymous IP addresses, so that it is practically impossible to track both who offers information and want access to it.
.Onion domains do not participate in the official domain name system (DNS) system although they do use a similar nomenclature. By not participating in the official domain name system, no traditional browser (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari…) recognizes these web pages. The same happens with the domains .bitnet, .i2p, .uucp ...
What's on the dark web
Not all content available and originally created for the Dark Web is related to illegal activities. Bitnet was a computer network of the universities of the United States, .Usenet in a global system of discussion on the internet that evolves from the UCCP networks.
If we talk about content outside the law, we talk about .onion domains. This content only available through the Tor browser. One of the most famous websites popularized by the Dark Web years ago was the Silk Road.
Silk Road was the largest black market on the internet that was only accessible through Tor. This website closed by the FBI in 2013, two years after going live. Although on Silk Road you could find from stolen credit card numbers, counterfeit coins, commissioning murders, weapons, the main attraction was the possibility of buy drugs without leaving home.
Obviously, they do not use credit cards or PayPal to pay, instead they use Bitcoin, an untraceable and decentralized digital currency. In case the transaction was not completed, there was a dispute system in place to resolve the dispute satisfactorily. Silk Road was like an eBay with illegal products and services.
Myths of the Dark Web
As I mentioned above, not everything we can find on the Dark Web is illegal or violates the morality of most people. In some countries it is used to share information restricted by some governments.
On many occasions it is said that in the Dark Web they can be found videos of torture, mutilation and other vexatious acts for anyone, it is not true that they are available in the Dark Web indexes, they are not available to anyone who begins to use Tor, from where they can access child pornography.
If you want to access the Dark Web, the first thing to keep in mind is that none of the pages you use guarantees security, nor in the content that you can download (malware, spyware, viruses, Trojans ...) or in the services that you may want to hire. The era of Silk Road, the eBay of illegal products and services, is over and at the moment there are still no alternatives that guarantee security in transactions.
While the Surface Web represents 4% of the internet, and the Deep Web 96%, the Dark Web only represents 0,1% of the internet.
You don't have to be a hacker or have computer skills to access the Dark Web, you just need to download the Tor browser.
Is it illegal to access the Dark Web?
Accessing the Dark Web is completely legal. What is not in hiring any of the different services that we can find in it.
How to access the Dark Web
As I have commented several times in this article, a method to access the Dark Web and be able to visit .onion pages it is through the Tor browser. Tor is available for Windows, macOS, Android, and Linux via this link. In our case, we are going to use the Windows version.
Tor it is not only designed to access .onion domains, but it is also focused on offering a real private browsing without tracking, so we can use it as our usual browser on a day-to-day basis, but due to its operation (through proxies to anonymize connections) the loading of web pages it is slower than a traditional browser.
Is open source and it is maintained thanks to donations from users. As we can read on their website:
Promote human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free and open source privacy and anonymity technologies, supporting their unrestricted availability and use, and promoting their scientific and popular understanding.
Once we have installed Tor and run it for the first time, we have to configure the operation of the browser if we are in a country that censors the use of Tor (it allows us to establish a bridge to bypass that censorship) or configure a proxy if we use one to connect to the internet.
If we are not in either case, twe still only have to click on Connect to establish the connection to the Tor network. Once the connection has been established, we must enter the web page .onion we want to search.
Dark Web search engines
Most likely, you do not know any web page with the .onion domain, so the first thing we should do is make use of a web page index or use the search engine DuckDuckGo.
The problem is that this search engine does not offer us .onion results exclusively, but it offers us the same results that we can get through any browser.
If you only want to find web .onion, the search you should use is Torch, a search engine that more than a million links to Dark Web pages.
Put away, with a very simple appearance and similar to Google, this website allows us to add our .onion web pages. In addition, it allows us to search with a wide range of options to filter content.
Not Evil, a search engine that is said to use the former motto of Google Do not be bad. This search engine allows us search both the Dark Web and the Surface Web, also allowing us to filter what kind of results we want to obtain.
Kilos is one of the most comprehensive search engines available on the Dark Web. This search engine, unlike the rest that we have at our disposal, has been specially designed for the Dark Web. Its use is aimed at looking for people who do non-legal work. I leave it there.
If we talk about Dark Web indexes we have to talk about The Hidden Wikii, one of the most important indices where we can find a large number of links to pages available only through Tor.
Where the Darknets are housed
Many of the web pages found on the Dark Web, they are not hosted in the main services storage such as AWS from Amazon or Azure from Microsoft, but are located on computers connected to the internet.
This is where its main problem lies, since some of the addresses that we may know may are not available at certain times of the day, because the computer where it is hosted is turned off.
If you create a web page accessible from your computer turned into a server, the IP address is the one that gives access to the page, and therefore, you can be easily located. When pages with the .onion extension are created, the network Tor generates a random name using an RSA key hidden the real IP.
When using Tor to visit an .onion page, the browser takes care of decrypting that name and turning it into a web page accessible only with this browser. During the process, the information has passed through different nodes on the route, in order to guarantee anonymity and privacy.