Is the Deep Web legal?
If you are wondering about the legality of the so-called deep web , you are in the right place. In this article, we explain everything you need to know about this controversial part of the internet.
Since its appearance, and even more so after its large-scale diffusion, the web has revolutionized our lives, putting at our fingertips a universe of information unimaginable until a few years before and allowing us to communicate in a few moments with people from from every corner of the world. All this, however, corresponds to less than 1 percent of the content of the entire internet.
Parallel to the Internet we know, made up of search engines, social networks and addresses composed of easily memorable text strings, there is in fact a so-called submerged web (deep web in English) made up of non-indexed portals due to their high level of secrecy or because of the illegal activities practiced through them. The question therefore arises: is it legal to enter the deep web? In the continuation of the article, we explain everything you need to know about it, in order to allow you to get a better idea of this controversial aspect of the Internet.
How to access the deep web
Before delving into the use of the deep web, it is appropriate to clarify some terms used, often inappropriately, when talking about the darker parts of the web. As we explained earlier, the deep web is a term that encompasses all sites not indexed by the most famous search engines, such as Google or Bing.
Within the deep web there is the subset of the dark web, i.e. content and sites that are freely accessible, but with a hidden IP address, therefore accessible only by those who know the address. Within the dark web there are structures called darknets, that is, a closed network of computers accessible to a small number of people, usually with ambiguous or completely illegal purposes.
We now come to the risks associated with the use of Tor and, more generally, the deep web. On the deep web there is not only a guarantee of anonymity, but also and above all illegal trafficking in weapons or drugs, the dissemination of shocking materials such as images of violence or child pornography and real haunts for fraudulent activities such as the buying and selling of personal data, identity or accounts working for portals such as Paypal or Ebay. You will also find yourself dealing with malware of all kinds, which can undermine your security and the stability of the system you are using. For all these reasons, we strongly advise against accessing the deep web, as you could easily find yourself helpless in the face of attacks and malicious intentions from people who are likely to have better computer knowledge than yours and hardware and software tools suitable for prosecuting their malicious purposes.
If you still decide to venture into this treacherous environment, pay attention to every site you visit and avoid downloading files or sharing your personal data. Obviously, do not make any kind of purchase, not even related to material that you consider legal or to people that you consider reliable. The very structure of this network could lead you to be accused or investigated for crimes you have not committed or to expose your sensitive data.
If you're wondering how to get into the Deep Web to start a criminal business, maybe it's best to think twice. Jokes aside, the Recorded Future researchers also found onion sites to be untrustworthy. To give just one example, they cite the case of Daniel's Hosting, a domain hosting service on TOR, hacked in 2018. There are 6,500 websites running on Daniel's Hosting, all of which have been shut down following the attack. They were eventually recovered, but the reality is that onion sites shutdown is very common.
To understand how unreliable they are, it is necessary to resort to the concept of uptime: how long a site is visible to the public. The maximum standard is that of the so-called "five nines": a perfect site has an uptime of 99.999% of the total. Facebook, for example, has an uptime of 99.95%.
In the dark internet, however, sites can even disappear for days or weeks. Even the best have an uptime well below 90% and in particular a popular eCommerce analyzed by researchers stops at 65%.
It is easy to fall into the trap: the Typosquatting technique
Predictably, scams and phishing activities are always around the corner on the Dark Web (for a definition of phishing, read: Online Safety: 10 Tips to Protect Against Hackers and “Theft”). Onion domains make it easier for a particular scam business called Typosquatting.
Let's try to understand how this works with an example from the surface web. If a hacker wants to steal the access data to your account on the Post Office, he could register a domain Poste-it.it, easily confused with the official Poste.it, invite you to click on a page similar to that of the Post Office and then convince you to enter your login details, effectively "stealing" them.
On the dark web this practice is even more widespread and simple. This is because onion domains are a seemingly random character sequence, which has nothing to do with the content of the site. An example? 7rmath4ro2of2a42.onion is a news site.
It therefore becomes even more difficult for the user to recognize the "official" site from a scammer and is therefore more likely to fall into the hacker trap.
There is a dark web in the dark web
There is a very small portion of onion sites that can only be accessed by invitation and that are generally not advertised in online communities. We could say that this is the real "dark" web, the darkest place of all, where criminal activities of a certain importance presumably take place.
To estimate how inaccessible they are, the researchers tried to figure out how many inbound links point to these sites. They found that the most hidden sites averaged 8.7 inbound links, while some of the most popular on the entire dark web have several thousand. For comparison, the most popular sites on the surface web also run into millions of links.
Here is an image that gives a good idea of the difference between the three types of domain: