Did you ever know that a dark hidden world exists in the world of internet? I recently had a chance to learn and give a peek into this strange, dark and anonymous world.
The first step to reaching this world is a software called Tor which is an anonymyzer software. This software makes your internet access completely anonymous. Let me explain how this works. If you browse the web normally as you do, the destination website can identify that you have visited. For example, if you point to yahoo.com on your browser, yahoo.com's servers can identify your IP address and you can be easily tracked back by your IP address. Further, your internet service provider (ISP) can sniff all the data that you send or receive when you visit different websites (Https sites are an exception but the ISP can still detect that you visited the particular site).
Tor is a software which hides your identity by encrypting all your browsing traffic making it impossible for the ISP to tap and find out which sites you visites and what data you exchanged. All your traffic will be routed through multiple layers of encryption through a network of Tor servers which are run by volunteers. The web page you visit (say yahoo.com) sees all your traffic coming from some Tor server (called an exit node in Tor network) and cannot identify your true IP address. The Tor network is designed in such a way that the Tor servers also cannot see your identity. This makes a great tool for people to access censored content in repressive countries like China, Iran, Saudi etc since the governments cannot control traffic through the Tor network. It is also a great tool for whistle blowers to publish secrets anonymously (Wiki leaks is the biggest example).
However what makes it most interesting is that Tor not only allows accessing the web anonymously but also allows hosting of websites anonymously. That means a person X can host literally any content inside Tor and still neither person X not the location of the content server can be located by anyone. These websites cannot be accessed from the open network and can only be accessed through Tor network. This is the hidden network where the most dark content are hosted by the most dark people on earth. You can find drug dealers, arms dealers, assassins, hackers, illegal files of all sorts .. and the list goes on..
One will be shocked at the content that one finds in this dark world and also astonished as to how people openly do hardcore illegal stuff behind the veil of anonymity. Many of these sites also could be fake and just a landing page for malicious websites trying to steal anything from your identity to your bank info and again sell that in this same anonymous world.
You can visit https://www.torproject.org/ to learn more about this world. You can install Tor and try around things but I would suggest utmost caution while you do anything on the hidden world. It is better and safer to install a virtual machine software and install any OS inside of the virtual machine and install Tor browser in it. This is to safeguard your primary computer and data in case your machine is compromised through your browser (remember that this is not a network of 'normal' people). Visit https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en#thesolution to understand how Tor works.
The hidden sites do not have conventional urls but have cryptic URLs which end with a .onion domain. For example, there is a hidden wiki with the url kpvz7ki2v5agwt35.onion which has a a menu of sites in the hidden world.
I have added the below screen shots from the Hidden Wiki that I accessed through the Tor browser installed on my Ubuntu OS running on a virtual machine.
As you can see in the screens, you find websites with most bizarre content and many of these could even be fake.
This hidden world also provides email facility and needless to say the emails will be untraceable and anonymous. Most of these illegal deals happen over the anonymous email mechanism. The emails use PGP protocol and everything is encrypted.
The most interesting thing is that this secret world uses a separate digital currency called Bitcoin. Bitcoin does not need an intermediate financial institution for transfer of currency from one individual to the other. According to Wikipedia, as of February 2013, the monetary base of bitcoin is valued at over 275 million US dollars. Interestingly, Bitcoin was created by a pseudonymous developer named Satoshi Nakamoto whose identity has till now not been verified.
This is a fascinating world with all sorts of people trying to do things anonymously for different reasons and motivations. The beautiful tools like Tor, Bitcoin or PGP was never meant to encourage crime but only enabled privacy. The engineering involved in building such tools is mind blowing. But like any other technology, they get misused by dark elements. It is even possible in future that all access to internet by everyone will be through such anonymizer tools.
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