Dark Web

Subject – Science and Tech

Context – Scouring dark web is helping Bengaluru Police in crackdown on drug trafficking.

Concept –

The dark net or dark web is an overlay network within the Internet which is not accessible through search engines, and where anonymous activities are carried out. For this reason, a market for illegal activities thrives here, including the sale and purchase of drugs, stolen data, hacking software, pornography etc.

Internet consists of three layers:

The first layer is public (Surface Web), consisting of sites that one uses frequently such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and LinkedIn. This layer makes up only 4% of the entire internet.
The second layer, the deep web, is a network where data is stored in inaccessible databases (i.e., cannot be accessed through traditional search engines like Google). It is used to provide access to a specific group of people.
- The data is generally sensitive and private (government private data, bank data, cloud data etc), so kept out of reach.
The third layer is the darknet which is also known as a part of the ‘Deep Web’. It is a network built over the internet which is encrypted.
- It is basically a layer of the Internet accessible only by using special software like Tor (The Onion Router), or I2P, which stands for Invisible Internet Project.
- Anything present on the dark web will not be pulled up in internet searches, thereby offering a high degree of anonymity.