You may have heard the terms Tor and dark web in the media. However, using these sites is not so dangerous as it sounds. It’s actually fairly easy to get started.
The dark web is a set of websites that aren’t indexable by search engines like Google. The dark web is the area of the internet in which data and content would otherwise be kept private. For instance, email inboxes online banking logins, online banking inboxes and Google Drive folders live on the deep web – they aren’t accessible to the general public using a normal web browser.
There are numerous websites on the dark web that have legitimate reasons. SecureDrop, for example, is a dark-web site that allows anonymously submitting sensitive information by whistleblowers. There are sites which allow users to buy and sell stolen credentials such as passwords, credit card numbers and social security numbers. These sites are often called ‘marketplaces’ and the most well-known examples are Silk Road and AlphaBay, but there are lots of others that have gone out of business.
Tor is the mainstay of the dark web. It routes your connection through a variety of volunteer servers that are scattered around the world. This makes it difficult for anyone to trace your movements. Tor is named that way because the data it encodes is processed through a variety of layers, similar to the onion layering in pizza, which helps to secure your privacy.