Deep Web & Dark Web, the place everyone wants to sneak peek at least once!

A darknet?is an?overlay network?within the?Internet?that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations, or authorization,?and often uses a unique customized?communication protocol. Two typical darknet types are social networks (usually used for?file hosting?with a?peer-to-peer?connection),?and?anonymity?proxy networks such as?Tor via an anonymized series of connections. The term dark web refers to encrypted online content that is not indexed by conventional search engines. Accessing the dark web can only be done using specific browsers, such as TOR Browser. There is a great deal of privacy and anonymity that comes with using the dark web compared to traditional websites.

Understanding Deep Web & Dark Web

A dive into Deep Web

The?deep web,?invisible web,?or?hidden web?are parts of the?World Wide Web?whose contents are not?indexed?by standard?web search-engines. This is in contrast to the "surface web", which is accessible to anyone using the Internet. The first conflation of the terms "deep web" with "dark web" came about in 2009 when deep web search terminology was discussed together with illegal activities taking place on the?Freenet?and?darknet.?Those criminal activities include the commerce of personal passwords,?false identity documents, drugs,?firearms, and?child pornography.

Since then, after their use in the media's reporting on the?Silk Road, media outlets have taken to using 'deep web'?synonymously?with the?dark web?or?darknet, a comparison some reject as inaccurate?and consequently has become an ongoing source of confusion.?Wired?reporters?Kim Zetter and?Andy Greenberg?recommend the terms be used in distinct fashions. While the deep web is a reference to any site that cannot be accessed through a traditional search engine, the dark web is a portion of the deep web that has been intentionally hidden and is inaccessible through standard browsers and methods.

Applications of Deep Web:

1.??????The public cannot access Intranets, or private networks, that are used by businesses and educational organizations.

2.??????Applications with a subscription model are accessible only after the user has paid for them. Search engine crawlers cannot access this information because of the paywall barrier.

3.??????Publicly accessible, free internet services are within the deep web category. Banking websites, for example, require users to check-in before they can read their account statements. Even email services like Gmail are part of the deep web because search engines cannot access the platform’s data.

A dive into Dark Web

"Darknet" was coined in the 1970s to designate networks isolated from?ARPANET?(the government-founded military/academical network which evolved into the?Internet), for security purposes.?Darknet addresses could receive data from ARPANET but did not appear in the network lists and would not answer?pings?or other inquiries. The dark web is like a secret network that exists underground, kind of and it's made up of a series of websites that are hidden from the general public. So normal search engines cannot access or index the sites over them. The dark web, on the other hand, uses information that isn't available on these other search engines, such as content from individual accounts, such as email,?social media, banking, along with personal and professional databases, and documents.

Applications of Dark Web:

1.??????The dark web’s primary use is to give website owners and users anonymity.

2.??????Websites that don’t want to be on the public internet, where they might be watched, can hide there thanks to the dark web.

3.??????Fascinatingly, even Facebook may be accessed as a Tor-hidden service, enabling users in nations where its platform is not legally accessible to surf the website securely.

Difference between Deep Web & Dark Web

1.??????Deep web usually used for legit purposes that require anonymity, but dark web sometimes used for illegal activities.

2.??????To access Deep Web you require a password, encryption whereas to access dark web you require Tor Project or a similar browser.

3.??????Both Deep and Dark Web are hidden and not shown to conventional search engines.

4.??????Deep Web is larger than the Surface web on the other hand Dark web size is unmeasurable.

?What is TOR Project?

To access the vast majority of the dark web, you’ll need?Tor. Tor is a network of volunteer relays through which the user’s internet connection is routed. The connection is encrypted and all the traffic bounces between relays located around the world, making the user anonymous. The easiest way to access Tor is through the?Tor Browser. You can?download and install it for free.?You might want to hide your Tor Browser download using a VPN and your existing browser’s private/ incognito mode. Officially, the Tor Browser is only available on Windows, Mac, Android and Linux. Many experts advise against using third-party mobile browsers that utilize the Tor Network. Sorry, iOS users. If you want to use Tor privately, you can use either a VPN or Tor Bridges (Tor nodes that are not publicly indexed). Tor users in the USA in particular may want to use a VPN, which will be faster and more reliable.

When using a?VPN for the dark web, your ISP will not be able to see that you are connected to a Tor node, only an encrypted tunnel to a VPN server.

Navigating the dark net

Since you have Tor, you can get to the dark web. Dark net sites are designated "Pinnacle stowed away administrations", and they can be recognized from ordinary sites by their URLs. Rather than ".com" or ".organization", dull web locations can be recognized by the high level domain, ".onion".

Clearly, seeing as these .onion sites is the main test, as they won't appear in Google list items. You can't simply Google "Silk Road" and desire to arrive on the dark site. A modest bunch of dim net web crawlers that do record .onion locales incorporate NotEvil, Ahmia, Candle, and Torch. There are additionally registries like dark.fail.

The dark web has no lack of tricks, phishing destinations, and malware intended to deceive amateurs. Links presented on the reasonable web specifically are frequently vindictive. What's more, since there's tiny utilization of HTTPS on the dark net, checking whether a site is real utilizing a SSL certificate isn't practical.

So, What about Anonymity

You can now securely peruse dark sites and stowed away wikis, however assuming you intend to do anything over that, you'll have to play it safe. In the event that you intend to make a buy on a dim net commercial center like Silk Road to get those medications your perishing mother so frantically needs to get by, for example, you'll have to make a phony personality. That implies setting up encoded email with another email address, scrambling messages with PGP, utilizing a pen name, up an unknown bitcoin wallet, debilitating Javascript in Tor Browser, exploring merchants, and the sky is the limit from there.

Once more, we can't underline sufficient that security and obscurity are principal to those on dull sites. Your ISP and the public authority probably won't have the option to see your action when on the Tor Network, yet they in all actuality do realize you are on the Tor Network, and that by itself is sufficient to cause a commotion. As a matter of fact, a new judgment by the US Supreme Court indicated that essentially utilizing Tor was adequate reasonable justification for policing search and hold onto any PC all over the planet.

Another crucial safeguard is to guarantee that your .onion URLs are right. Onion URLs for the most part contain a line of apparently irregular letters and numbers. When you are sure that you have the right URL, save it in a scrambled note — the Tor program won't store it for some other time.

VPN over Tor versus Tor over VPN

A VPN permits a client to encode all the web traffic heading out to and from their gadget and course it through a server in an area of that client's picking. A VPN in mix with Tor further adds to the security and secrecy of the client.

While fairly comparative, Tor underscores secrecy, and a VPN underlines protection. Joining them diminishes risk, yet there's a significant differentiation in how these two apparatuses cooperate. How about we initially examine Tor over VPN.

Assuming you interface with your VPN and fire up Tor Browser, you're utilizing Tor over VPN, this is by a wide margin the most well-known strategy. All your gadget's web traffic initially goes to the VPN server, then, at that point, it skips through the Tor Network prior to winding up at its last objective. Your ISP just sees the scrambled VPN traffic and won't know you're on Tor. You can get to .onion sites ordinarily.

TOR over VPN expects you to believe your VPN supplier, which can see that you are utilizing Tor and keep metadata logs, however it can't really see the substance of your scrambled Tor traffic. A logless VPN, which stores no traffic logs nor meeting logs is exceptionally ideal. Traffic logs contain the substance of your web traffic, for example, search inquiries and sites you visited, while meeting logs contain metadata like your IP address, when you signed into the VPN, and how much information was moved. Traffic logs are a greater worry than meeting logs, however nor are great.

TOR over VPN additionally doesn't shield clients from malevolent Tor leave hubs. Since Tor hubs are comprised of workers, not every one of them carry on reasonably. The last hand-off before your traffic goes to the objective site is known as the leave hub. The leave hub decodes your traffic and consequently can take your own data or infuse pernicious code. Furthermore, Tor leave hubs are frequently obstructed by sites that have no faith in them, and Tor over VPN can't actually hope to make any difference with that, by the same token.

Then there's the less well known VPN over Tor, which is exhorted against by the authority Tor Project. Just two VPN suppliers that we are aware of, AirVPN and BolehVPN, offer this help, albeit neither of these score exceptionally for speeds. For this situation, the request for the two apparatuses is exchanged. Web traffic initial goes through the Tor Network, and afterward through the VPN. This implies the VPN supplier doesn't see your genuine IP address and the VPN safeguards you from those awful leave hubs.

The huge drawback is that your ISP will realize you are utilizing Tor, which is reason to worry in certain spots and will put many individuals off utilizing this strategy. In this occurrence, as well, it is essential to utilize a logless VPN and pay with Bitcoin on the off chance that you can to remain unknown. The VPN over Tor procedure is additionally powerless to a start to finish timing assault, however it's exceptionally far-fetched.

Are there any other projects like TOR?

Yes, FreeNet, Subgraph O.S., and the invisible Internet project I2P comes under this umbrella. Hidden services that are only accessible through browsers like Tor, Riffle, I2P, and Whoinx, etc. But, Tor is the most robust unidentified communication tool among them. It has a broad user base as it allows users to dodge hostile government surveillance activities by providing secrecy.

So, what you will find on darknet?

If you want e-commerce sites for drugs, you can consider you are at correct place. Similarly, you can buy countries citizenships, fake ID’s, stolen credit cards, hire to kill etc. you can see there is no end to this.

The latest crime rings are based on crypto currencies. By itself Bitcoin is a currency designed with anonymity in mind, and as a result it is frequently used when purchasing illegal goods and services (and of course legitimate goods as well ). But while on one hand all Bitcoin transactions are anonymous, as long as you do not link your wallet code to your real identity, on the other they are fully public. Due to the setup of the Bitcoin blockchain every transaction is fully public ?and can be examined by investigators. In bitcoin laundering, tracking money as it moves through the system is doable, albeit quite difficult. As a result, a number of services have come about to add further anonymity into the system – making the electronic currency even more difficult to track. ?

Deep web & Malware:

In many ways, the Deep Web and malware are perfectly suited for each other, especially when it comes to hosting command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure. It is the nature of hidden services and sites like TOR and I2P to hide the location of servers using strong cryptography. This makes very difficult for forensic researchers to investigate using traditional means like examining a server’s IP address, checking registration details, and so on. In addition, using these sites and services isn’t particularly difficult. It is then not surprising to see a number of cybercriminals use TOR for C&C. We’ve seen the operators behind prevalent malware families use TOR for some parts of their setup. They simply bundle the legitimate TOR client with their installation package. Trend Micro first wrote about this trend back in 2013 when MEVADE malware caused a noticeable spike in TOR traffic when they switched to TOR-hidden services for C&C. Other malware families like ZBOT followed suit in 2014.

?As a first example, VAWTRAK malware is a banking Trojans that spreads via phishing emails. Each sample communicates with a list of C&C servers whose IP addresses are retrieved by downloading an encrypted icon file (i.e., favicon.ico) from hard-coded TOR-hosted sites. This provides the advantage of anonymizing.

?How to Identify Darknet Security Risks

Patterns of deep web activity can reveal an attack in progress, planned attacks, threat trends or other types of risks. Signs of a threat can emerge quickly, as financially-driven hackers try to turn stolen data into profit within hours or minutes of gaining entry to an organization’s network.

The average time it takes to identify a cybersecurity incident discovery is 197 days, according to the 2018?Cost of a Data Breach Study?from the Ponemon Institute, sponsored by IBM. Companies who contain a breach within 30 days have an advantage over their less-responsive peers, saving an average of $1 million in containment costs.

Employing dark web monitoring solutions that allow the use of focused filters to identify key phrases, such as your brand and product names, that may contain information that can negatively affect your organization is a good start in your effort to glean useful intelligence from the dark web.

Few of the following things as a organization you can keep in mind:

1. Organization or Industry Discussion
2. Personally Identifiable Information (PII) Exchange
3. Credential Exchange
4. Information Recon
5. Phishing Attack Coordination
6. Trade Secrets and Sensitive Asset Discussions

While there is clear strategic and tactical value to darknet threat intelligence, significant challenges can arise on the road to deep web threat hunting and data-mining. For instance, it’s not ideal to equip security operations center (SOC) analysts with a Tor browser. The potential volume of false positives based on the sheer size of the hidden web necessitates a more effective approach. When researchers discover a credible source, it generally requires hours to vet intelligence and perform a complete analysis. Darknet commerce has also grown increasingly mercurial and decentralized as law enforcement tracks criminal TTPs as they emerge. Security leaders who can overcome these barriers have the potential to significantly improve security strategy in response to emerging threat trends and risk factors.

The roleplay of AI (Artificial Intelligence):

Artificial intelligence (AI ) could provide deeper security and increased productivity at lower costs. Sixty-nine percent of respondents stated that the most significant benefit of AI was the ability to increase speed in analyzing threats.

There are two main ways AI is bolstering cybersecurity. First, AI can help automate many tasks that a human analyst would often handle manually. These include automatically detecting unknown workstations, servers, code repositories and other hardware and software on a network. It can also determine how best to allocate security defenses. These are data-intensive tasks, and AI has the potential to sift through terabytes of data much more efficiently and effectively than a human could ever do.

Second, AI can help detect patterns within large quantities of data that human analysts can’t see. For example, AI could detect the key linguistic patterns of hackers posting emerging threats in the?dark web?and alert analysts. Clearly there is a foreseeing future in this area of study.

Is it illegal to use Dark net?

In the vast majority of countries, the dark web itself is not illegal and it is not illegal to access it. It’s true that some of the content hosted on .onion sites is either illegal itself or relates to illegal activities, but in the same way that it’s legal to own a knife but it’s not legal to wield it in public, there is no legally objectionable reason for you not to access the dark web. Moral objections, on the other hand, are open for debate.?

So, is it illegal to access the dark web? No. But that doesn’t mean it’s completely without risk.

Thanks for reading.