We live in a world full of information every day, and typing keywords into search engines will bring up a lot of relevant content, so have you ever thought about where the boundaries of the web are? This massive amount of information actually only accounts for 10% of the network, and the remaining 90% of the network content is in the deep web. I think you should have seen the picture below.
That's what I'm going to talk to you about today: the dark web.
The Internet is divided into the open web and the deep web. Mingwang is the website that we can search on our usual search engine. Social networking sites, video sites, game sites and other websites that can be accessed directly, the information is already very complex, but for the entire Internet this is only the tip of the iceberg.
The deep web has a relatively certain threshold and requires permission to access it. For example, the background of the government website, the company's internal operation system, your own email, etc., you can only enter with an account password.
And those mysterious, dark, dirty corners in the deepest part of the deep web that cannot be revealed in the sun, we call them the dark web. The dark web is stored in a web database, but is not accessible through static URLs and requires invitation to access specific dynamic web pages.
So how do you get into the dark web?
The dark web requires specific software, configuration, and authorization to access it, but more commonly a specific browser, the "onion routing" browser (also known as "Tor"). This anonymity system was originally developed by the U.S. Naval Laboratory to facilitate the transmission of intelligence by foreign intelligence officers and avoid revealing identities. Every IP on Tor is encrypted like an onion, making it difficult to trace.
In 2002, the U.S. military opened the source code to the public in order to conceal the use of TOR by secret agents, because if only intelligence officers could use it, its secrecy would be meaningless. Whenever someone uses Tor to browse the web, one finds a CIA agent browsing the site because they are the only ones using Tor. Only by allowing ordinary people to participate in its use will it be more convenient for intelligence officers to hide in it.
Silk Road
Despite being open for so many years, not many people really knew that the dark web existed until October 2013. After an event that caused a sensation on the entire Internet, the number of users of the dark web skyrocketed.
It was a sunny afternoon, in an ordinary library, everyone was quietly reading and working, at this time a couple suddenly broke out in a quarrel, just when the melon-eating masses were about to eat melons, a group of FBI from the corner of the library quickly took away a man's laptop and quickly arrested the man. This person is none other than the founder of the Silk Road, Ulbricht.
(Ross Ulbricht)
Silk Road was created in 2011 and all the programs on the entire website were built by Ulbricht self-taught programming. He was also the first merchant to settle on the Silk Road, selling his hallucinogenic mushrooms on them, and within days customers were coming to his door.
Soon, more and more drug dealers came to settle in this mall, and poisonous insects also poured in. The "Silk Road" has become the drug version of "Taobao". Slowly in addition to drugs, other categories began to increase: guns and ammunition, counterfeit banknotes, fake passports, prostitution, murder for hire, human trafficking, and all the more legal and illegal goods you can think of, with more than 1 million registered users and more than 10,000 types of goods, but 70% are still drugs.
People from all over the world trade illegally here, and Ulbricht, as an administrator, spends his days teaching them how to seal drugs and avoid being tracked. Of course, it is not for nothing, he will charge a fee of about 8%-15% of the transaction value. In two years, Ulbricht earned $1.2 billion, equivalent to 7.7 billion yuan.
(Screenshot of Silk Road website)
Ma Yun said that there is no difficult business in the world, he himself did not do it, Ulbricht did it.
The outside world said that "the Silk Road is a perfect miracle, if not for selling drugs".
According to statistics, the annual transaction volume of Silk Road is as high as billions of dollars, and such an amazing business volume naturally attracted the attention of the FBI. But Silk Road, built on the dark web, uses decentralized bitcoin for transactions. Each IP address is a virtual address that is encrypted layer by layer, which makes it impossible to start the investigation.
But the FBI is not a dry meal, the dark web can not be found, look on the clear web, and they really found a Silk Road trace, a person posted on the Internet claiming to have found a Tor hidden service, on the Silk Road can buy any commodity anonymously. The FBI screened the entire network ID and found the person's account number and the email address he left on the Bitcoin website. Finally, after a series of investigations, the real name of this person was finally found: Ross Ulbricht.
Ulbricht is very smart, after the FBI sent agents posing as drug dealers to communicate with him online for two years, he has been on high alert, and later after infiltrating the Silk Road, this agent chose to join in the face of huge financial temptations, while helping the police arrest Ulbricht, while constantly using false identities to make money on the website and participate in money laundering.
Although Tor can encrypt IP layer by layer, it cannot withstand layer by layer decryption, and finally with the unremitting efforts of the FBI, the location of Ulbricht was finally locked. Because Ulbricht is a very good network engineer, once he closes his computer, the Silk Road program is automatically encrypted, so be especially careful when arresting, be fast.
At the time of his capture, Ulbricht was managing the backstage of the Silk Road, and the evidence was overwhelming, and he was eventually sentenced to life in prison. The Silk Road was also closed.
But it wasn't over, and eight months later Silk Road 2.0 went live on the dark web. It turned out that Ulbricht had hired several hackers to run the Silk Road together. 2.0 was created by these hackers. At the end of 2014, the police arrested two Silk Road 2.0 administrators, and the Silk Road was blocked again.
A few hours later, 3.0 went live quickly. The FBI is dumbfounded, endlessly this is.
Although the Silk Road is like leeks to cut stubble after stubble. But it's just one of many illegal websites on the dark web.
hacker
In addition to drug crimes, the dark web is also a gathering place for hacker groups, where many professional hackers exchange technical experience or launch attacks on specific targets, such as attacking a normal website that leads to paralysis for extortion of money, or stealing other people's social accounts to trade on the black market. Sometimes they will blackmail bitcoins, otherwise they will hand over the real information of the other party to the police.
Ordinary people really don't go into the dark web if they have nothing to do, so as not to be targeted by hackers, and the goose will definitely leave traces, professional hackers can pick up three generations of your ancestors, and even make you inexplicably involved in various cases.
Since the dark web does not have a content censorship mechanism, the dark side of human nature is vividly displayed here. Sexual abuse, child pornography, and even teaching you how to kidnap and kill. Like the "South Korean Room N" incident that broke out two years ago, the price is clearly marked on the dark web.
But, as I always say, everything in the world is black and white, and although there is a sin side to the dark web, it cannot be completely denied.
In 2013, after the US Prism project was exposed, the number of users using Tor soared from 1 million to 6 million. People who are very privacy-conscious or need to remain anonymous in their local voices are still using Tor.
There are also some journalists who use Tor to gather information, especially international journalists, who are more or less dark web users.
For ordinary people, the information of the clear net is enough for us to explore. The dark web, really cautious, curious about everything, very dangerous.