The Internet is divided into various layers. The Internet Work‘s likes this. Dark web is also a part of Internet.
1.Surface web : It is the first layer,also called as Visible Web.Here,we and every other internet user have access to most of the website directly.
Ex:Google,bing,facebook,etc
This surface web only consists of 10% of the entire internet data. So, basically, you are surfing only a minute part of the internet all your life provided if you access mainstream websites every day
2.Deep web : Moving a little deeper from surface,we reach to the second,we reach to the second layer which can also be termed as the invisible web.
Here,our personal data and the confidential data which is handled by government authorities etc.
Websites or data in the deep web appear doing a simple google search. To access the data present here, One must enter a password or the encryption key by the website or file to get access
3.The Dark web : The third layer of the Internet. Dark web is also termed as the subnet of deep web.
Here data is on overlay networks that use the internet but require specific software configurations or levels authorization to access. Mostly domains in the dark web end with “onion”. This part is also not indexed by web search engines.
Activities :
Dark web is the palce where many illegal activities take place online such as dealing with drugs,illegal weapons,Child Pornongraphy, HumanTrafficking,spying etc against the law.
The transactions behind each deal or activity will take place in the form of virtual cash,bitcoins or in any other form of cryptocurrency as the transactions via debit, credit card, etc can be easily traced back.
Establishment of Tor(The Onion Router)
The dark web was first established by the US government to exchange the classified information anonymously and away from the general public who has
access to the regular internet.
The IP address of the original user who tries to access any website hosted in the darknet is masked and the request will be bounced via different levels or nodes and masked at every interval.
Let’s say you have a message to send in TOR network(Darknet)
The message will be wrapped in 3 layers of encryption, each layer only knows from where the message has come from and where to send it next, nothing else.
Original information will be hidden from all the midpoints.
While passing through these 3 midpoints, a layer of encryption is removed at each point and the new layer tells where the message should go further. After traveling through all the midpoints, all the encryption is removed and the original message is conveyed to the recipient.
Thus, the us govt has termed it has Onion Routing considering the nature of Onion having several layers until the core.
They have established the Onion routing to share the classified tips and information but now, TOR hosts around 30,000 websites that are anonymous and do a lot of illegal things justifying the term Dark web.
only a few websites seem to be good which hosts, blogs, journalist forums, etc who wanted to do good by hiding their identity.
One example is Wikileaks, which is hosted on a dark web allowing the whistleblowers to share the classified information to the press.
In 2011, a darknet market names “Silkroad” has been opened for business. It was hosted on the dark web and sellers from all over the world participated anonymously and sold Drugs, guns & Ammunition, Counterfeit Cash, etc.
After 2 years, Silk Road was taken down by the FBI, it generated 9 million bitcoins which amounts to 187 billion US dollars now.
Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the silk road was arrested in 2013 and sentenced to 40 years of jail without parole time.
Few other darknet websites were also busted but still, there are many clone websites namely Silkroad 2.0,3.0 and so on popped up and the networks have become unimaginable!
Intelligence agencies from all over the world are working on to track down the originators but dark web is rising to the next level.