By Al Restar, Zero Day
The internet is a scary world. It’s infested by cruel people, fake news, malicious and threat actors, bullies, and oppressive regimes. But all we can see online is not the scariest thing the internet is to offer. What we normies can see online is only 10% of what’s in there – the tip of the iceberg.
Now imagine the internet as a huge iceberg submerged in the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean. The things we can see are just the tip of it, the part that is not underwater and search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo is our naked eyes. Whatever these search engines can crawl and index are available to everyday internet users like us. But search engines are not omni-seeing. There is a plethora of content on the internet that search engines cannot and will not be able to see.
The part of the internet iceberg that search engines cannot index is what we call the deep web. It is the part of the iceberg that sailors won’t be able to see simply because they are submerged in water. And that comprises around 90% of all the things on the internet.
What we can access with our browsers right now is overwhelming. But the deep web is ninefold worse than what we can get our eyes on. Since the deep web is not accessible to common people, it contains contents that are far more sensitive. It is where drug dealers, contraband sellers, fetishists, and hackers lurk.
The deep web is also where sensitive forums are. Activists and those that are critical to the government turn to the deep web to communicate with each other to establish their anonymity. Eccentric subcultures like BDSM, Roleplaying communities and other fetishes also use the deep web to connect with other people that they share their interests with.
Getting inside the deep web is relatively simple. While it cannot be accessed by normal browsers, there is a special browser that anyone can download and use in order to gain access to the dark side of the internet. It’s called a ToR browser. It is the browser used to access sites with domain names ending in (dot) onion.
If this is scary for you, you might want to step back as there is even a scarier place on the internet. In the abyss of the deep web, there is a darker, more dangerous place – it’s called the dark web.
The dark web is where people who sell highly illegal contrabands like high powered rifles, harvested organs, malware, and child porn can be found. It is a place that only people with highly sophisticated internet skills can go to.
More than these contrabands, the dark web also hosts contents that are truly disturbing. In many accounts, the dark web contains videos of people killing and cooking other people. It is where law enforcement found the infamous video of ISIS beheadings. And these are just reported cases, who knows what’s in there that have not been reported with.
But of course, the police and the military knows that the dark web exists. That’s why many government-sponsored experts are also lurking on the dark web. They are there to zero in those that sell and buy contrabands and to harvest evidence. In the past few years, the U.S. government has been able to arrest people selling drugs, arms, and illegal pornography on the dark web. They were also able to arrest hackers and cybercriminals.
Being in the dark web alone could lead to someone being arrested. With the sensitivity of the contents that can be found in the dark web, simply being there and viewing those contents are illegal acts. For example, there is a law that prohibits watching child porn, and since child porn videos are rampant in the dark web, chances are someone will most likely stumble upon at least one of it.
The dangers of the dark web do not even end there. Prolific hackers are there as well as hardened criminals. So while you can browse it, it is important that you do not. The internet is a scary place, and it’s much scarier than we thought of. Happy Halloween!