Continuing our series on cyber security, we will feature some new articles on aspects of cyber warfare. Today we start with the Dark Web.
What is anonymity? Can I find out who you are? Can I spider a site to get its content? Can I find it in a search engine? What is the cost of being virtually invisible?
The US Naval Research Laboratory created Tor in 2002. Tor was originally designed to create totally anonymous communications across the Internet. Used by government agencies originally, Tor was not sequestered to these uses. It was then adopted by those that wanted to remain hidden like activists, dissidents and hacktivists. When the military created was a platform that was so good at hiding communications that they themselves couldn’t hack into it. Tor has become an ample playground for cyber crime and terrorists trying to remain anonymous.
The release of information by Edward Snowden in 2013 brought light into the NSA and GCHQ trying to find ways to hack into Tor. When it was originally created, it was touted as being fullproof, a way to remain free and clear of tracking identity in communications. Tor is being used to construct the dark web which hides things like illegal drug sales, gun trafficking and pornography. Terrorists are using the anonymity the dark web provides to remain hidden in the system.
Websites that display in Goggle are indexed allowing them to be searched. Yes, there are sites that don’t allow themselves to be crawled or indexed. There are ways to hack and get the content of the website server directly, the dark web is something different than that.
Cybercrime causes loss of trust by consumers, loss of confidence and requires entities to spend a lot of money cleaning up damage or putting resources into hardening their security. DDOS attacks, phishing, malware and fake antivirus are just some of the ways that can cause companies to get attacked preying on users.
Bitcoin is another form of currency that is often used to pay for items in the dark web. Dumps of credit card data, identity theft, selling ID information and fake IDs are also things that can be found on the dark web. Dumps are sometimes cheap but the cost of using them may be high.
The website Silk Road was one of those sites selling illegal drugs, porn, pharmaceuticals, guns and other things that was prolific until the FBI was able to take them down. Even though they were taken down many sites rose up to take its place calling themselves Silk Road 2.0.
Ordinary internet uses should not expect privacy in social media or other online activities. All that can be trackable. Privacy is something that was rewritten with the Internet of Everything. The world is changing. Only nations, large corporations and entities can hope to have privacy online but even that may be limited by what they have access to. The average internet user does not have that luxury.