Hacker Lexicon: What Is the Dark Web?

The Dark Web is a collection of thousands of websites that use anonymity tools like Tor and I2P to hide their IP address. Hiding in plain sight The majority of Dark Web sites use the anonymity software Tor, though a smaller number also use a similar tool called I2P. The actual Dark Web, by contrast, likely accounts for less than.01 percent of the web: Security researcher Nik Cubrilovic counted less than 10,000 Tor hidden services in a recent crawl of the Dark Web, compared with hundreds of millions of regular websites. A Few Cracks of Light Though the Dark Web is most commonly associated with the sale of drugs, weapons, counterfeit documents and child pornography—and all those vibrant industries do in fact take advantage of Tor hidden services—not everything on the Dark Web is quite so “dark.” One of the first high profile Dark Web sites was the Tor hidden service WikiLeaks created to accept leaks from anonymous sources. In early November, a coordinated action by the FBI and Europol known as Operation Onymous seized dozens of Tor hidden services, including three of the six most popular drug markets on the Dark Web.