A SEMINAR REPORT
On
“Deep & Dark Web”
Submitted by:
Saurbh Wasnik
Master of Science (C.S.) – Semester
II
Department of Electronics and
Computer Science,
RashtrasantTukadoji Maharaj
University Campus,
Amravati Road, Nagpur.
2018-19
CONTENTS
·
Introduction
·
The Deep Web
·
Levels Of The Deep Web
·
How To Access Deep Web
·
Why These Browsers
·
Benefits Of Deep Web
·
The Dark Web
·
Usage
·
Defining Attributes
·
Illegal Activity And The Dark Web
·
Cybercrime In The Dark Web
·
The Internet, The World Wide Web The
Deep Web
· Deep Web Vs Dark Web
·
Conclusion
·
References
INTRODUCTION
The deep web also known as invisible web or
hidden web are parts of the World Wide Web and its contents are not indexed by
standard search engines for any sort of reason. The content of the deep web is
hidden behind HTML forms. The surface web is the opposite term to the deep web.
Common uses of the deep web are web mail and online banking but they are also
paid for services with a paywall such as on demand video and many others.
Everyone who uses the Web virtually visits what could be reflected as Deep Web
sites on a daily basis without been
aware. A place where whole sections of internet within which all
of the websites are hidden from the view of regular web surfers, and also in
which the people using them are hidden from view is referred as deep web . Deep
web is the anonymous internet where it is much difficult for hackers, spies or
government agencies to track internet users and have a look on which websites they are using and what are
they doing there.
The
large part of the Internet that is inaccessible to conventional search engines
is known as deep Web (invisible Web). Messages, chat messages, social media
sites private content, electronic bank statements, electronic health records
and other content of the deep web are accessible over the Internet but are not
crawled and indexed by search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing or DuckDuckGo.
There are various reasons for not indexing deep Web. Some reasons may be of the
content been proprietary, in which only the approved visitors entering through
a virtual private network (VPN) can access the contents. Sometimes the contents
may be commercial .In this case the content residing behind the member wall can
only be accessed by customers who have paid a fee. In a case where the content
contains personal identifiable information (PII), it can only be accessed through a portal site by individuals who have
been granted access privileges and is protected by compliance regulations .
When components lack a permanent uniform resource location (URL) and mashups
have been generated on the fly , they become part of the deep web It is not
known exactly how large the deep web is, but it is estimated by many experts
that the search engines crawl
and
index less than 1% of all the content
been accessed over the internet. Surface web is that part of the Internet which is crawled
and indexed by search engines
THE DEEP WEB
Deep
Web is the part of the Web which is not indexed by conventional search engines
and therefore don’t appear in search results
LEVELS OF THE DEEP
WEB
Level 1
It
is the most common web or internet. We use it pretty much daily as well as know
and understand it. It generally comprises of the ‘Open to the Public’ part of
the Web.
Level 2
It
is commonly known as the Surface Web.
Services such as Reddit, Digg, and temporary email are included in it.
Chat boards and other social enabling content can be found in this level as it
is essentially a communications platform. To reach it in any fashion is not
difficult.
Level 3
level
3 is called Bergie Web. Services besides WWW or Web services are been included
here. It consists of Internet newsgroups, Google locked results, FTP sites,
honeypots and other sites such as 4Chan. If you know where you are going, this
level is relatively simple to reach.
Level 4
Level
4 is known as Charter Web or Deep Web. Hacker groups, activist communications,
banned media and other darker layers of the online society are included in this
websites. This is what we basically refer to as Deep Web. Typical Web search
engines cannot find the sites on this layer .
You have to be invited by an existing member. In order to be able to
access these sites Level 5 In this level, things get a little creepy. The level
is known as Dark Web through the normal Internet These websites are not
accessible to this level. You will need to get on the TOR network, or some
other private networks .Dark Web sites are also referred to as TOR Hidden
Services or onion sites. On the TOR network there is a variety of legal and
illegal content. Illegal materials such as bounty hunters, drugs, human
trafficking, hacker exploits, rare animal trade and other black market items
are been included in these sites. Whenever we refer to Dark Web, we are normally referring to the TOR network.
TOR NETWORK
Fig
- 1 : TOR Network Diagram.
TOR
stands for "The Onion Router".
To run TOR software installed on your computer and TOR connections
managed by network of computers both are considered. In simple terms, TOR
permits you to route web traffic through several other computers in the TOR network
so that the party on the other side of the connection can’t trace the traffic
back to you. More TOR users means more protection for your information, since
you are using other computers to route your connections and sessions . It
creates a number of layers that conceal your identity from the rest of the
world as the name implies.
A
Tor Project website blog page discussing the takedown of Silk Road (an online
marketplace that dealt with contraband drugs, narcotics and weapons) by the
FBI. iStock.
HOW TO ACCESS
DEEP WEB
For entry points into Dark Net Deep Web,
onions, and Tor are the way to go in terms of gathering a backgrounder. Much of
the information currently on the surface of Internet about the actual
underbelly of the web is outdated. The Under-web has been changing, ever since
Silk Road’s take down last year. You first have to download the Tor add-on for
Firefox to get into the Deep Web these days. You are securing your anonymity to
browse by downloading the Tor Browser Bundle from the Tor Project , which is
the main drawback for using Tor. Tor builds a circuit of encrypted connections
through a randomized relay, once you have downloaded the browser bundle. In
general terms that means that as Tor randomly pings your IP address from one
place to the other your online activity is covered , thus making whatever you
do less traceable. Multiple Redditors advice reading the warning page of Tor Project’s, as they
discourage torrent downloading and file sharing
while using Tor. To follow protocol maintaining your anonymity while
chatting, browsing or navigating is the core idea of this. This clearly
includes giving away your personal information like phone numbers ,email
addresses, time zones, names or home addresses
in any situation. Tor 4.0, the newest iteration of the Tor browser, was
released in October 2014. To enable use behind China’s massive Internet
firewall It primarily contains a variety of product designed . Placing duct tape on your webcam,
turning off cookies and JavaScript ,enabling your computer’s firewall, are some
of the precautions that can be included. Treading cautiously is key, where you
want to be completely free of an identity, so . Using cross-reference tools,
malware, and remote administration tools the NSA and other government outlets
peruse the Dark Web and onion sites frequently to find users engaging in
illegal activity. While the Deep Web gathers the drugs, retail of weapons and
illicit erotica, some useful tools are also available for thrill seekers, journalists and researchers. Mere access through Tor is not illegal but
can arouse suspicion with the law which is worth noting . Deep Web is the
beginning point of most of the illegal transactions but those transactions most
often flow elsewhere for retail, in-person meet ups, thus due to this most
people get caught by law enforcement officials. To allow Tor to be used on an
Android or iOS device several browsers exist . Or Web, Anonymous Browser
Connect Tor, the mobile Firefox add-on, Onion Browser, and Red Onion and some
of the browser. Security concerns have been raised for all of these browsers
which is one of the most important concern and that anonymous browsing cannot
be 100% guaranteed for any of these.
WHY USE THESE
BROWSERS?
Search
engine crawlers do not pick up most resources including:
●
Dynamic content: dynamic pages which are returned in response to a submitted
query or accessed only through a form
●
Unlinked content: pages which are not linked to by other pages (ie backlinks or
inlinks)
●
Private Web: sites that require registration and login
●
Limited access content: sites that limit access to their pages in a technical
way
●
Scripted content: pages that are only accessible through links produced in
script (ex javascript)
●
Non-HTML/text content: textual content encoded in multimedia files
●
Text content using the Gopher protocol and files hosted on irregular FTP
BENEFITS OF DEEP
WEB
There
are multiple purposes of the dark web sites but the important reason behind its
usage is to remain anonymous. For privacy concern the hidden web is been used
. Benefits Information remains safe and You won’t let
your information out. Dark web sites are not crawled by any spiders. Tor
browser is used to access hidden web to
talk anonymously. services like emails, I2P, Free net, Tor, P2P, Tail OS and
VPN are been provided.
THE DARK WEB
The dark Web is the portion of the deep Web that
has been intentionally hidden and is inaccessible through standard Web
browsers. Dark Web sites serve as a platform for Internet users for whom
anonymity is essential, since they not only provide protection from
unauthorized users, but also usually include encryption to prevent monitoring. A
relatively known source for content that resides on the dark Web is found in
the Tor network. The Tor network is an anonymous network that can only be
accessed with a special Web browser, called the Tor browser (Tor 2014a). First
debuted as The Onion Routing (Tor) project in 2002 by the US Naval Research
Laboratory, it was a method for communicating online anonymously. Another
network, I2P, provides many of the same features that Tor does. However, I2P
was designed to be a network within the Internet, with traffic staying
contained in its borders. Tor provides better anonymous access to the open
Internet and I2P provides a more robust and reliable “network within the
network” (Tchabe and Xu 2014).
USAGE
The ability to traverse the Internet with complete
anonymity nurtures a platform ripe for what are considered illegal activities
in some countries, including:
• controlled substance marketplaces
• credit card fraud and identity theft; and
• leaks of sensitive information.
Silk Road was an online marketplace that dealt with
contraband drugs, narcotics and weapons. In 2013, the US Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) shut down the website. But like the mythical Hydra, the
website resurrected as Silk Road 2.0 within a month. It took the FBI another
year to track down its administrator and servers (Mac 2014). It should also be
noted that Tor empowers anyone who wants control over his or her online
footprint. The positive value of such a tool is huge for some groups, such as
whistle-blowers who report news that companies would prefer to suppress, human
rights workers struggling against repressive governments and parents trying to
create a safe way for their children to explore the Web.
DEFINING
ATTRIBUTES
Anonymity,
from the Greek word anonymia, refers to the state where one’s personal identity
is not publicly known. Each day, our Web actions leave footprints by depositing
personal data on the Internet. This information composes our digital identity —
our representation in cyberspace. Internet anonymity is guaranteed when
Internet Protocol (IP) addresses cannot be tracked. Tor client software routes
Internet traffic through a worldwide volunteer network of servers, hiding
user’s information and eluding any activities of monitoring. This makes the
dark Web very appropriate for cybercriminals, who are constantly trying to hide
their tracks (Paganini 2012).The dark Web is also the preferred channel for
governments to exchange documents secretly, for journalists to bypass
censorship of several states and for dissidents to avoid the control of
authoritarian regimes (Gehl 2014). Anonymous communications have an important
place in our political and social discourse. Many individuals wish to hide
their identities due to concerns about political or economic retribution. Onion
routing is a technique for anonymous communication over a computer network.
Messages are repeatedly encrypted and then sent through several network nodes,
called onion routers. Like someone peeling an onion, each onion router removes
a layer of encryption to uncover routing instructions, and sends the message to
the next router, where the process is repeated. This technique prevents
intermediary nodes from knowing the origin, destination and contents of the
message (Tor 2014a).
ILLEGLE ACTIVITY
AND THE DARK WEB
Just
as nefarious activity can occur through the Surface Web, it can also occur on
the Deep Web and Dark Web. A range of malicious actors leverage cyberspace,
from criminals to terrorists to state-sponsored spies. The web can serve as a
forum for conversation, coordination, and action. Specifically, they may rely upon
the Dark Web to help carry out their activities with reduced risk of detection.
While this section focuses on criminals operating in cyberspace, the issues
raised are certainly applicable to other categories of malicious actors.
Twenty-first century criminals increasingly rely on the Internet and advanced
technologies to further their criminal operations. For instance, criminals can
easily leverage the Internet to carry out traditional crimes such as
distributing illicit drugs and sex trafficking. In addition, they exploit the
digital world to facilitate crimes that are often technology driven, including
identity theft, payment card fraud, and intellectual property theft. The FBI
considers high-tech crimes to be among the most significant crimes confronting
the United States. The Dark Web has been cited as facilitating a wide variety
of crimes. Illicit goods such as drugs, weapons, exotic animals, and stolen
goods and information are all sold for profit. There are gambling sites,
thieves and assassins for hire, and troves of child pornography. Data on the
prevalence of these Dark Web sites, however, are lacking. Tor estimates that
only about 1.5% of Tor users visit hidden services/Dark Web pages. The actual
percentage of these that serve a particular illicit market at any one time is
unclear, and it is even less clear how much Tor traffic is going to any given
site.
CYBERCRIME IN
THE DARK WEB
Peter
Grabosky (2001) notes that virtual crime is not any different than crime in the
real world — it is just executed in a new medium: “‘Virtual criminality’ is
basically the same as the terrestrial crime with which we are familiar. To be
sure, some of the manifestations are new. But a great deal of crime committed
with or against computers differs only in terms of the medium. While the
technology of implementation, and particularly its efficiency, may be without
precedent, the crime is fundamentally familiar. It is less a question of
something completely different than a recognizable crime committed in a
completely different way.”
DRUGS, WEAPONS AND EXOTIC ANIMALS
Websites
such as Silk Road act as anonymous marketplaces selling everything from tame
items such as books and clothes, to more illicit goods such as drugs and
weapons. Aesthetically, these sites appear like any number of shopping
websites, with a short description of the goods, and an accompanying photograph
(Bartlett 2014).
STOLEN
GOODS AND INFORMATION
It
is correct to assume that dedicated sites facilitate users to trade in both
physical and proprietary information, including passwords and access to
passwords for surface Web paid-pornography sites and PayPal passwords (Westin
2014). PayPal Store, Creditcards for All and (Yet) Another Porn Exchange are
active websites that offer such services.
MURDER
The
Assassination Market website is a prediction market where a party can place a
bet on the date of death of a given individual, and collect a payoff if the
date is “guessed” accurately. This incentivizes the assassination of
individuals because the assassin, knowing when the action will take place,
could profit by making an accurate bet on the time of the subject’s death.
Because the payoff is for knowing the date rather than performing the action of
the assassination, it is substantially more difficult to assign criminal
liability for the assassination (Greenberg 2013). There are also websites to
hire an assassin — popular ones are White Wolves and C’thuthlu (Pocock 2014).
TERRORISM
The
dark Web and terrorists seem to complement each other — the latter need an
anonymous network that is readily available yet generally inaccessible. It
would be hard for terrorists to keep up a presence on the surface Web because
of the ease with which their sites could be shut down and, more importantly,
tracked back to the original poster.
THE INTERNET, THE WORLD WIDE WEB AND THE DEEP WEB
Many people use the terms Internet and World Wide
Web interchangeably, but in fact the two terms are not synonymous. The Internet
and the Web are two separate but related things. The Internet is a massive
network of networks — a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of
computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can
communicate with any other computer, as long as they are both connected to the
Internet. On the other hand, the World Wide Web, or simply the Web, is a way of
accessing information over the medium of the Internet. It is an
information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet. The Web uses
the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, only one of the languages spoken over the
Internet, to transmit data. The Internet, not the Web, is also used for email,
which relies on Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, Usenet news groups, instant
messaging and File Transfer Protocol. The Web, therefore, is just a portion of
the Internet, albeit a large one (Beal 2010). Finally, the deep Web is, put
simply, the part of the Web that is hidden from view. It is World Wide Web
content that is not part of the surface Web. It cannot be accessed by normal
search engines. This massive subsection of the Internet is more than 500 times
bigger than the visible Web (Barker and Barker 2013).
DEEP WEB VS DARK
WEB
Fig
- 2 : Deep web, Dark web and Internet.
The Internet: Regular type of internet
everyone uses to read news, visit social media sites, and shop. The Deep Web:
The deep web is not indexed by the major search engines and is a subset of the Internet . This means that instead of being able to search for
places you have to visit those directly
. They’re waiting if you have an address but there aren’t directions to get
there . The Internet is too large for search engines to cover completely thus
Deep web is largely present. Deep web
commonly refers to all web pages that search engines cannot find. Hence it
includes the 'Dark Web' along with all
web mail pages, user databases, registration required web forums and pages behind pay walls. The Dark Web: The Dark Web also known as Dark
net that is indexed, but to be able to access it, requires something
special e.g. authentication to gain access. The Dark Web often resides on top of additional
sub-networks such as Tor, Free net and
I2P .It is often associated with criminal activity of various degrees,
including pornography, buying and selling drugs, , gambling, etc. While the Dark Web is used for criminal
purposes more than the standard Internet or the Deep Web, there are many
legitimate uses for the Dark Web as well. Things like using Tor to analyze
reports of domestic abuse, government oppression, and other crimes that have
serious consequences for those calling out the issues are included in
Legitimate uses.
CONCLUSION
The
deep Web — in particular, networks on the dark Web such as Tor — represents a
viable way for malicious actors to exchange goods, legally or illegally, in an
anonymous fashion. The lack of observable activities in unconventional dark Web
networks does not necessarily mean they do not exist. In fact, in agreement
with the principle that inspires the dark Web, the activities are simply more
difficult to spot and observe. A driving factor for the marketplace is critical
mass. Operators in the dark Web are unlikely to need a high level of stealth
unless the consequences, if they are discovered, are sufficiently severe. It is
conceivable that sites may come online at specific times, have a brief window
of trading, then disappear, making them more difficult to investigate. Recent
revelations about wide-scale nation-state monitoring of the Internet and recent
arrests of cybercriminals behind sites hosted in the dark Web are starting to
lead to other changes. It would not be surprising to see the criminal
underbelly becoming more fragmented into alternative dark nets or private
networks, further complicating the job of investigators. The dark Web has the
potential to host an increasingly large number of malicious services and
activities and, unfortunately, it will not be long before new large
marketplaces emerge. Security researchers have to remain vigilant and find new
ways to spot upcoming malicious services to deal with new phenomena as quickly
as possible.
REFERENCES