आईसीटी समाचार
The Dark Web is a smaller portion of the Deep Web and can only be accessed through specialized . The Deep Web consists of sites not indexed by Internet search engines, deep web may be 500 times bigger than the normal web. Darknet software browsers like Tor, Freenet, and I2P.
So, consider for one moment, as many websites as you can think of on the internet. Google, Yahoo, various news outlets, personal email services, any number of websites that might be used in research & education, large and global corporations. Now, mentally place all of these websites on a little island in a large body of water. Let's call this the 'clear web”. Consider now, everything else: all the water below the island and to the seafloor. This is the deep web. At the very bottom, you'll find what's referred to as the “dark web”.
The Dark Web hosts similar content to the regular Internet except the user and site hosts are anonymous to each other. Since the quantity and quality of information contained on the Dark Web is difficult to ascertain the word “Dark” is used. Built in anonymity is the primary reason illegal markets have flourished on the Dark Web.
Websites on the dark web don’t end in “.com” or “.org” or other more common web address endings; they more often include long strings of letters and numbers, ending in “.onion” or “.i2p.” Those are signals that tell software like Freenet , I2P or Tor how to find dark websites while keeping users’ and hosts’ identities private.
Is the dark web illegal?
We don’t want to leave you with the impression that everything on the dark web is illegal. The Tor network began as an anonymous communications channel, and it still serves a valuable purpose in helping people communicate in environments that are hostile to free speech. A lot of people use it in countries where there’s eavesdropping or where internet access is criminalized . If you want to learn all about privacy protection or cryptocurrency, the dark web has plenty to offer.
Here’s also material that you wouldn’t be surprised to find on the public web, such as links to full-text editions of hard-to-find books, collections of political news from mainstream websites and a guide to the steam tunnels under the Virginia Tech campus. You can conduct discussions about current events anonymously on Intel Exchange. There are several whistleblower sites, including a dark web version of Wikileaks. Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent site that law enforcement officials have repeatedly shut down, is alive and well there. Even Facebook has a dark web presence. As a result, people often think of the dark web as a place where people sell drugs or exchange stolen information—or as some rare section of the internet Google can’t crawl. It’s both, and neither, and much more.
Terrorists use of the Web
Recent studies have shown how terrorists use the Web to facilitate their activities. For eg ,Tsfati and Weimann used the names of terrorist organizations to search six search engines and found 16 relevant sites in 1998 and 29 such sites in 2002 . Their analysis of site content revealed heavy use of the Web by terrorist organizations to share ideology, to provide news, and to justify use of violence. Relying on open source information (e.g., court testimony, reports, Web sites), researchers at the Institute for Security Technology Studies identified five categories of terrorist use of the Web : propaganda (to disseminate radical messages); recruitment and training (to encourage people to join the Jihad and get online training); fundraising (to transfer funds, conduct credit card fraud and other money laundering activities); communications (to provide instruction, resources, and support via email, digital photographs, and chat session); and targeting (to conduct online surveillance and identify vulnerabilities of potential targets such as airports).
Among these, using the Web as a propaganda tool has been widely observed. Identified by the U.S. Government as a terrorist site, Alneda.com called itself the “Center for Islamic Studies and Research,” a bogus name, and provided information for Al Qaeda .
To group members (insiders), terrorists use the Web to share motivational stories and descriptions of operations. To mass media and non-members (outsiders), they provide analysis and commentaries of recent events on their Web sites. For example, Azzam.com urged Muslims to travel to Pakistan and Afghanistan to fight the “Jewish-backed American Crusaders.” Qassam.net appealed for donations to purchase AK-47 rifles . Al Qaeda and some humanitarian relief agencies used the same bank accounts via www.explizit-islam.de .
Terrorists also share ideologies on the Web that provide religious commentaries to legitimize their actions. Based on a study of 172 members participating in the global Salafi Jihad, Sageman concluded that the Internet has created a concrete bond between individuals and a virtual religious community. His study reveals that the Web appeals to isolated individuals by easing loneliness through connections to people sharing some commonality.
Such virtual community offers a number of advantages to terrorists. It no longer ties to any nation, fostering a priority of fighting against the far enemy (e.g., the United States) rather than the near enemy. Internet chat rooms tend to encourage extreme, abstract, but simplistic solutions, thus attracting most potential Jihad recruits who are not Islamic scholars. The anonymity of Internet cafés also protects the identity of terrorists.
Finally, collecting and analyzing Dark Web information has challenged investigators and researchers because they can easily hide their identities and remove traces of their activities on the Web. The abundance of Web information has made it difficult to obtain a comprehensive picture of illegal activities. Using advanced Web mining, content analysis, visualization techniques, and human domain knowledge, the methodology exploited various information sources to identify and analyze such Web sites. Information visualization is used to help to identify illegal clusters and to understand their use of the Web.
The expert considered the visualization results very useful, having potential to guide policymaking and intelligence research. Researchers are pursuing a number of directions to grab such sites. Researchers will develop scalable techniques to collect such volatile yet valuable content to visualize large volumes of Dark Web data and extract meaningful entities from terrorist Web sites.
