Within the last couple of years notoriety of the Dark Web has risen within the media. It’s left a lot of people wondering what is the so called “Dark Web”?

For those unaware there are a few layers of the internet, according to The Guardian only 0.03% of the internet is actually indexed by search engines like Google leaving a lot of the internet inaccessible – this is called the Deep Web. It is called the Deep Web because of its huge size, it’s literally very ‘deep’ as it stores all user databases, webmail pages and registration-required web forums. There are huge numbers of such pages, and most exist for mundane reasons however there is the further layer of the Dark Web below that.

You can’t just access the Dark Web from a normal web browser, you can only access the Dark Web through a Dark Web browser which offers anonymity. The most commonly used one is called Tor. As the population is becoming more aware of companies breaching people’s privacy, downloads of Tor are starting to rise significantly.

This is because when you’re using Tor you are truly anonymous and your location cannot be picked up and neither can your browsing. Essentially whatever you do in the deep web you cannot be monitored and as such the dark net is becoming a more suitable option for internet users who value their privacy.

All sites on the dark net are .onion domains, which basically means both the provider and user are anonymous and very hard to trace. All types of illegal and legally questionable products and services can be found somewhere in the Dark Web from hit men to drugs they all market their services on these platforms.

You can even get your hands on a US visa.

An example of one of the most popular was The Silk Road, a now-defunct website that operated as an illegal type of classifieds website. The Silk Road at its height listed 10,000 products for sale, 70% of which were drugs, and it hosted $200 million in transactions. Products also included drugs, fake IDs, pirated DVDs, fireworks, and stolen credit-card numbers.

Slightly different from your average online shopping.

All payments were conducted using Bitcoin, which meant they couldn’t be tracked the way credit-card transactions can be. Bitcoin, allows transactions to be made anonymously and with no one in charge of the Bitcoin network there is no one to block illegal transactions.

Disguising bitcoin earnings can be quite hard to do when converting them to dollars; one slip-up can reveal your real identity. Eventually in 2013 the operator of Silk Road was arrested but since then there has been many copycat sites developed. The next site was called Silk Road 2 however it was forced to shut down in 2014. Currently, one of the largest Silk Road successors is a site called Evolution.

As you can see it’s quite an interesting place, not necessarily there to create bad. For some people a great way to gain online privacy and for others a twenty first century method to build up an illegal empire.