By browsing the traditional internet accessible via the usual search engines and browsers, you may think that you have sites and no less unlimited data at your disposal. Unfortunately for you, you are absolutely wrong, because not only does this part of the web have its limits, but there is also another hidden part even larger than it. It is, therefore, Darknet, a collection of non-indexed web pages.
Since selling drugs, weapons, and data from cards of credit stolen content to child pornography entering the “Darknet” means entering a dark world where, in large part, products, services, and all kinds of publications that, for many, represent the worst side of humanity.
Darknet is not accessible with a normal browser, and you can find all kinds of illegal goods there. To access this part of the internet, users need to take a lot of precautions because they are many dangers involved.
Here we are describing five reasons why one should not go onto the Darknet –
Crypto fraud
Although the popularity of the cryptocurrency is increasing, the existence of darknet is bad news for many crypto fans. Not many newcomers know the dark side of the crypto world. However, the loudest media headlines announce that the crypto market is promoting criminal activity.
It is not unusual that fraudsters and cybercriminals prefer the most popular coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero for their activities. Anonymity and confidentiality of darknet are the most attractive features for criminals in the crypto world. According to recent research, more than 95% of all illegal activities in the darknet were done with Bitcoin. This is, of course, because Bitcoin is the most popular cryptoasset alongside its liquidity and value.
It is disorganized and unreliable
If you are wondering how to enter the darknet to start a criminal activity, it is perhaps better to think twice. Joking aside, Recorded Future researchers also found that onion sites are unreliable. There are 6,500 websites running on Daniel’s Hosting; all obscured following the attack. They were eventually recovered, but the reality is that the shutdown of onion sites is very frequent.
To understand how unreliable they are, it is necessary to resort to the concept of uptime: how long a site is visible to the public. The maximum standard is that of the so-called “five nines”: a perfect site has an uptime of 99.999% of the total. Facebook, for example, has a 99.95% uptime.
In the dark internet, however, sites can also disappear for days or weeks. Even the best ones have an uptime well below 90%, and in particular, a popular eCommerce analyzed by researchers stops at 65%.
Hoaxes in the Dark Web
Almost all the sites of the darknet that claimed to offer interesting content turned out to be hoaxes, whether it was torture livestreams, paid killers, or human trafficking.
Eileen Ormsby, journalist, and author of the Silk Road drug market book, brought to the attention of everyone a site, a “red room,” which claimed to stream live footage of torture and homicide.
The red rooms are a hard-to-die belief among those surrounding the dark web, but they have confirmed to be nothing more than urban myths. In this specific case, it would have been a red room in which prisoners of the Islamic State were tortured.
Crime as a Service
The darknet is a real danger to society. It is used by criminals for drug trafficking, counterfeit paper trafficking, counterfeit money trafficking. But above all, it allows a new form of crime, “Crime as a Service.” Criminals are no longer in an integrated structure, but each one only takes care of one task in the cyber-criminal chain. Everyone sells their services on the network and can focus on their core business.
The Darknet shows us a hyper-secure ecosystem, in which technical and organizational solutions are pushed to their maximum to secure transactions despite a very inhospitable environment. The mechanisms implemented on the Darknet are adaptable in high-risk environments and for which levels of anonymity and security are required. We can see, however, that even people with very high motivation and good technical knowledge manage to get caught. Security and complete anonymity are very difficult to obtain.
It’s easy to fall into a trap
Predictably, scams and phishing are always around the corner on the darknet. The onion domains make it easier activity cheating particular call Typosquatting.
In the darknet, this practice is even more widespread and simple. This is because onion domains are a seemingly random sequence of characters, which has nothing to do with the content of the site. It, therefore, becomes even more difficult for the user to recognize the “official” site by a fraudster and is, therefore, more likely to fall into the trap of hackers.
Conclusions
Darknet is a special Internet network that works completely anonymously and gives access to data storage that cannot be accessed in the public network. The use of Darknet can be due to a number of circumstances in which it is necessary to hide your identity.
For people with a fragile psyche, visiting the Darknet can be dangerous as the files it contains are not moderated and are not hidden by censorship, which means that they can include violence, murder, and cruelty.
