Tech Tips

The dark web: An introduction

Have you come across the term, dark web, recently? You might have heard that you need to keep your business data safe from this part of the web. So, what is the dark web anyway?

WHAT IS THE DARK WEB?

The cybercrime landscape is evolving fast. The “Nigerian” email scams are now old. Cybercriminals are smarter and more organized now–almost functioning like professionals. As a result, there’s a sort of a parallel universe where they all operate in a very corporate-like manner. And that parallel universe is called the dark web.

THE SURFACE WEB, THE DEEP WEB, AND THE DARK WEB

Essentially, we can categorize the internet into three parts.

The surface web. The surface web includes your ‘regular’ websites–the kinds that show up on web searches. For example, you type Dog Videos, and links to many dog videos on YouTube show up. YouTube, in this case, is an example of the surface web.
The deep web shows up in web searches but requires you to log in to view specific content—for example, your internet banking page or your Netflix subscription.
Then comes the dark web.

The dark web is part of the internet that isn’t visible to search engines and requires an anonymizing browser called Tor to be accessed. This part of the web offers anonymity and hence is the hub for all sorts of illicit activities in today’s internet age. Strictly speaking, this part of the web typically hosts illegal content. The kind of content that you find on this part of the web include:

Credit card details, stolen login credentials for something as serious as internet banking accounts to something as trivial as Uber or Netflix,
Contact details/communication platform for striking deals with hitmen, drug dealers, weapon dealers, hackers, etc.,
A marketplace to buy malicious codes to help corrupt or jam IT systems and even RaaS (Ransomware as a service!)

All of the above and more, for a fee, of course. In short, this part of the web is like the underworld of the internet.

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