![dark web iceberg dark web iceberg](https://www.ally.com/do-it-right/images/2020/08/0820-Iceberg-graphic-v1.png)
To access the Dark Web, you’ll need a browser that’s able to access the Tor network. Names, credit card numbers, and Social Security numbers all had a price tag. What else could be bought and sold on the Silk Road? Identities. Drugs, weapons, illicit images of children – it was all there, and it was all for sale. The first popular black-market site on the Dark Web, known as the Silk Road, sold it all. Now, instead of just being a place where illegal information could be exchanged and completely off the record conversations could take place, the Dark Web became a place where illegal, anonymous transactions could be made. With the advent of anonymous computing and the anonymous exchange of funds, the Dark Web as we know it was born: Amazon for criminals. So, for all intents and purposes, we’ll call Bitcoin anonymous. While it is somewhat possible to trace transactions made with Bitcoin, it isn’t easy. Bitcoin allows users to exchange currency with relative anonymity. In 2009, Bitcoin was established as the first viable cryptocurrency. In 2009 came the last building block: cryptocurrency. These sites were unable to be indexed by search engines and existed on the Deep Web. We’ll talk more about the implications of these freedoms in a future chapter.Īlong with the anonymity that TOR granted users on the Surface Web, a “darknet” of sites began to become available only to TOR users. And with the freedom of anonymity, similar activities began occurring using TOR that occurred with the introduction of Freenet: illegal and illicit information could be shared with no repercussions. And in 2002 The Onion Router, commonly known as TOR, was released.īy routing internet traffic through multiple servers and encrypting it each step of the way, TOR allows users to be anonymous and largely untraceable while on the internet. Naval Research Lab took on the challenge in pursuit of a solution. Knowing that this could be extremely beneficial to intelligence operations, the U.S. Researchers wanted to know if there was a way to create internet connections that didn’t reveal who was talking to who. In 2002, the next building block of the Dark Web fell into place. This anonymity allowed pirated content, illegal information, and illicit images to be shared freely and without consequence.
![dark web iceberg dark web iceberg](https://www.lincolnit.com/hs-fs/hubfs/CS_Iceberg_DarkWeb2-1.png)
The airline’s flight availability is a part of the Deep Web, or the second layer of the onion. The airline’s website is a part of the Surface Web, or the first layer of the onion. This flight information is stored privately on the Deep Web, where it can be accessed and changed only by the airline. However, when you type your travel dates into the airline’s website and click “search”, the resulting information about available flights will be pulled from the Deep Web. The airline’s website is part of the Surface Web, as you can find it from entering the airline’s name into a search engine. Here’s another example: if you’re booking a flight and would like to view the available options, you first head to the airline’s website. Then there’s information that cannot be indexed by search engines and will not show up in search results. The Surface Web, indexed by search engines, is visible and accessible to everyone with an internet connection. Once a page has been indexed, it will be visible in results from search engines. This is effectively what a search engine does: it sends out a web crawler to click from link to link and index the pages that it lands on. Here’s an example: if you go to a news website, you can click on different links, which will take you to different news articles. Any page you cannot find through a web search tool is known as the Deep Web. However, all of the information that can be found through search engines is just the tip of the iceberg.Īny webpage that can be found through a web search tool such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo, is content found on the Surface Web. The searchable internet is a big, huge place: you can find information on almost anything (and in quite a few languages) with the right search terms.