Do you search your bank account details at google? Or carry monetary transaction through google?
But, we get our bank details from the server of the bank’s website. And here we part the web: one you go for search engines, search your query and get results of it and the other one anonymous web not accessed by all. So we term them respectively as surface web and deep web.
‘Dark Web’ is a part of deep web, which you do not get access via common search engines, instead need a different browser to browse it.
Different browser?
Yeah! To access the dark web you need a browser called ‘TOR’ (The Onion Router). Browsing through Tor, you can hide your own IP address and assign to the IP address of another server. So the word ‘anonymous’ best suits for all the stuffs related to Tor and the dark web i.e. when you access Tor browser, your IP is anonymous which means it gives you an IP unknown to your ISP or google. Tor browser is free and you can easily download it from your common web browser.
And here arises the question: Is Tor legal or illegal? Is being anonymous while using web accepted in your country?
It depends on your country’s rule about private network. It might be illegal in the countries considering VPNs illegal. Although, Tor might me legal, the websites under it may be illegal. However, google even sponsors Tor and telling websites may be illegal, facebook also has its website on it. A legitimate site ‘Blackbook’ is considered as the facebook of Tor.
Talking about websites under Tor, they don’t have ‘.com’ or ‘.co’ extensions instead, they have ‘.onion’ extension. Since an onion has many layers on it, accessing Tor websites consists of different layer of sites making it anonymous. Browsing through the dark web involves ‘onion routing’.
Now, ‘what is onion routing?’
Before that, let us know how social networking community runs.
When we use facebook, google and all those social platforms, we give our some sort of private to them. That is, they know our contact number, location and so on to access us. So, using surface web, we can’t maintain our privacy to the level we want. It gets to conclude that we have open source community using them. But privacy matters! Hence the VPN (Virtual Private Network) was made into practice.
But, when we use VPN, our ISP may not know what we are accessing but our specific VPN provider can surely know. And here VPN fails.
Now it’s clear that onion routing must maintain better level of privacy through dark web.
Therefore, dark web has onion routing comprising numerous VPNs, so when you access certain website on it, the website searches you how you’re accessing it but due to different VPNs (proxy servers), it becomes difficult for you to be traced. And hence it’s anonymous. [Pic: Onion Routing]
To be clear on this, suppose, you visited “thefarak.onion” on Tor, and also suppose Tor used 100 proxy servers for you to finally access this website. Now, “thefarak.onion” tries to know how you are accessing it but for that it should go on- server1…server2…..server3…..and so on and it couldn’t know through which server are you accessing it. So you’re anonymous. This is how onion routing occurs.
If browsing through Tor is that anonymous, how can we think of being hacked or being attacked by illegal works in dark web?
Being anonymous is both best and worst for Tor.
When you create a dark web site with “.onion” in Tor, and if someone get access to it, your computer itself acts as the server and you need no hosts. You can be the host yourself. To be clear, when I create a website in Tor and if someone goes on my site, I create the web service to him/her through Tor. Since my computer acts as the server itself, the entered data on my site can be accessed by me. So you are likely to be hacked and since it’s anonymous, you don’t know what’s going on.
And finally, it’s better not performing internet banking through it and not providing real identity to unknown websites of it. Malware attacks, drug dealing, selling and buying hacked accounts, viruses, operational and financial data theft and other type of attacks occur. So it’s better to be careful. If you want a private environment browsing internet, carefully accessing dark web could be a good choice.
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