anonymous because it becomes extraordinarily diicult to
match the initiator of a request with the content that was actu-
ally retrieved.
The dark web has another component. In addition to the
anonymising browser, Tor lets people host what are known as
“hidden service” websites. These websites are hosted anony-
mously and can only be accessed via the Tor browser. The
hosting process, while distinct from the browser process, employs
the same combination of principles: breaking up a signal and
injecting random change into the process to generate anonymity.
Unlike regular websites, the sites on the dark web are not
indexed and easily searchable. To ind them, a person either
needs to use a wiki site that provides a rough catalogue of sites
(although many of the links provided will be dead) or be given
the address by someone else.
In some cases, the sharing of a dark web address could occur
between criminals. In others, as in the case of a form of malware
known as Ransomware, a hacker could lock a person out from
their computer and then direct the person to a dark website in
order to pay a ransom for the keys to unlock the device. Others,
particularly in repressive regimes, might hear of a site through
word of mouth from international activists.
The pairing of anonymous web browsing and anonymous
website hosting is when things get complicated. Recently, two
computer scientists named Gareth Owen and Nick Savage
from the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom
volunteered computers into the Tor-hosted dark web to try to
get a sense of what was going on in the internet’s shadowy
underbelly.
They started by categorising the types of hidden service
websites hosted by the Tor network. They found a bunch of sites
that would come as little surprise to anyone who watches the
news: sites dedicated to the sale of drugs, such as the infamous
and now defunct Silk Road, along with many other illegal
marketplaces. There were also fraud sites, gambling sites and
chatrooms. They also found that roughly 2% of all the Tor
hidden service websites that they characterised hosted child
abuse images, videos and chatrooms.
That 2% became very important in the second stage of their
work.
As a next step, Owen and Savage started to track the low of
site visits to the various categories that they had developed.
They found that while only 2% of the Tor hidden service
websites were dedicated to child abuse imagery, just over 80%
of the all traic through the dark web went to this small sliver
of nefarious websites (http://tinyurl.com/gmteg6m).
When you combine these empirical results with media
coverage describing the dark web as a seedy underbelly of the
internet where digital drug kingpins roam and where anything
you could ever think of is available for hire, you get a pretty
dismal picture of what the dark web is and the uses to which it
can be put.JUNE 2016|| 13