What is the dark web?

Maximum anonymity and special access re­stric­tions – these are the features that char­ac­ter­ise the dark web. The hidden sphere of the world wide web is syn­onym­ous with criminal activity. But what exactly does the term ‘dark web’ mean, what dangers lurk, and how do you gain access to it in the first place?

The term ‘dark web’ describes a part of the world wide web that cannot be accessed via search engines such as Google. Instead, a special browser is required to access websites with .onion domain ex­ten­sions. Basically, the term ‘dark’ refers only to the fact that it is an access-re­stric­ted virtual space. However, since this is often used by criminals, the dark web is always as­so­ci­ated with forbidden activ­it­ies and dark mach­in­a­tions.

Char­ac­ter­ist­ic of the dark web, apart from re­stric­ted access, is maximum user anonymity. Pages you look at or whom you com­mu­nic­ate with remain hidden. Even payment trans­ac­tions can be anonymous with crypto­cur­ren­cies such as bitcoins.

In general, it is possible to access legal web offers via the dark web, provided that a cor­res­pond­ing .onion variant has been created for this purpose. You can read more about .onion below. For example, in countries where social media pages such as Twitter or Facebook are censored, users could access these pages via the dark web. Journ­al­ists, opponents of political systems and whistle-blowers also use the anonymity to dis­sem­in­ate in­form­a­tion. In other words, the dark web provides plenty of room for ‘positive’ activity.

However, in reality, there’s a lot of illegal activity occurring on the dark web. The trade in stolen data and drugs on mar­ket­places and forums is one of the more harmless processes happening on the dark web. Serious criminal offences, arms traf­fick­ing, and human traf­fick­ing take place on the dark web.

Access to the dark web is usually via a Tor browser, which can be down­loaded just like Google, for example, but it works dif­fer­ently. ‘Tor’ is an ab­bre­vi­ation for ‘The Onion Router’. This name provides a good de­scrip­tion of how the un­der­ly­ing Tor network works.

Unlike tra­di­tion­al browsing on the visible web, user requests are not passed directly to the target site’s server and sent back. Instead, several su­per­im­posed networks or layers (similar to those of an onion) are used. A random path is chosen for the trans­mis­sion of data via the various layers and nodes, the in­form­a­tion is dis­trib­uted across several routes and is not re­as­sembled into a complete image or website until it reaches the recipient.

The in­di­vidu­al con­nec­tions between the nodes are encrypted and change con­stantly. Tracking the data and identi­fy­ing the sender and receiver is more difficult. A no­tice­able result of this trans­mis­sion process is that it takes sig­ni­fic­antly longer for a page to load fully. Users with higher security needs often combine the Tor browser with a VPN tunnel.

However, using a Tor browser alone does not mean that you are surfing the dark web. You are using the dark web when you are surfing on a domain ending in .onion. Pages ending in .onion cannot be indexed by Google or other tra­di­tion­al search engines. To access a page on the dark web, you either need to know its HTML, or use the (often in­com­plete) search engines and dir­ect­or­ies for .onion pages.

For regular Internet users, the dark web is rarely worth a visit. Although it has potential for mean­ing­ful activity and provides maximum anonymity, it is still a space where criminals tend to gather. Most people probably can’t even begin to imagine what kind of business goes on there. If you are toying with the idea of using a Tor browser because of its anonymity, a VPN client is the better al­tern­at­ive. It serves a similar purpose and maintains web security.