The Dark Web Has Shrunk By 85% (bleepingcomputer.com) 107
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The number of Dark web services has gone down significantly following the Freedom Hosting II hack that took place at the start of February, and only consists of around 4,400 services, according to a recently published OnionScan report. Previous research published in April 2016 by threat intelligence firm Deep Light had the total number of Dark Web services at around 30,000. Comparing the two numbers, the report shows a decrease of over 85% in the overall size of Dark Web in the last year alone. According to the recent OnionScan statistics, the Dark Web is laughably small, with around 4,000 HTTP websites, 250 TLS (HTTPS) endpoints, 100 SMTP services, and only 10 FTP nodes.
Has the dark web shrunk 85%? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or has it became 85% darker?
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Very good point. Also, this article seems to only talk about Tor? Maybe people have switched to I2P?
Re:Has the dark web shrunk 85%? (Score:5, Insightful)
Calling TOR the Dark Web is like calling a movie you can stream on Netflix "obscure, exclusive, and little known."
The real Dark Web is the stuff you don't know that you don't know about. Packets passing through the backbone that nobody but the sender and receiver understand.
Re: Has the dark web shrunk 85%? (Score:1)
Re:Has the dark web shrunk 85%? (Score:5, Interesting)
The only way to become "darker" is to become harder to access and with fewer on-ramps. That leads to fewer customers and lower revenue, and will lead to decline. So if law enforcement is forcing the dark web to become darker, that is a sign of effectiveness.
Re: Has the dark web shrunk 85%? (Score:1)
unless your customers arrive by sneakernet with lotsa cheese pizza with hotdogs ontop and a big purple triangle on a hat.
Re: Has the dark web shrunk 85%? (Score:1)
Re: Has the dark web shrunk 85%? (Score:5, Interesting)
True! I doubt that they have simply gone off-line. They must have found some other system since they know TOR has been compromised.
Re: Has the dark web shrunk 85%? (Score:2)
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LOL!
That could be the explanation! I hope not...But the American Government has done weirder things! :-)
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TOR isn't compromised. Stop spreading FUD.
The loss of Freedom Hosting did take a lot of sites down, but it's likely a lot are still up and just unlisted. It's not like the normal web with DNS servers and ranges of IP addresses to scan for HTTP servers.
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If you believe that TOR is not compromised, then you should read this excerpt from this article in WIRED magazine...there are similar stories from many other outlets as well.
"The Feds Would Rather Drop a Child Porn Case Than Give Up a Tor Exploit
The Department of Justice filed a motion in Washington State federal court on Friday to dismiss its indictment against a child porn site. It wasn’t for lack of evidence; it was because the FBI didn’t want to disclose details of a hacking tool to the defe
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That's not TOR, that's the browser that ships with the TOR Browser Bundle.
Not all activity is illegetimate (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't make sense that 85% of them suddenly stopped being greedy and slimey all of a sudden.
Every criminal thinks they will never get caught, or has already resigned themselves to the idea that it is part of the game. Some might have closed up shop, but 85%? I highly doubt it.
Not 100% of what goes on the dark web is criminal.
Take tor as an example:
Yes, some of them use .onion tor web services for the purpose of hiding ethically-dubious criminal activities.
(silk road used to be an example back then).
BUT, some use them for very practical reason like evading censorship (though it is *still* considered illegal in some specific jurisdiction, globally it's not and it's hardly unethical). .onion tor server [3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion].
The popular Duck Duck Go search engine also has a
If you're in China, and want to get informations about Tibet or the Tiananmen Massacre or simply about Taiwan, you can't through a normal search engine. They are either blocked in China or collaborate with the government and only report government-approved informations.
On the other hand, if you have access to the tor network (along with VPNs that's one of the few popular solutions to get around China's Great Firewall) you can search the web using Duck Duck Go's onion tor server. (And then read the source using your tor socks proxy).
As needs come and go, or because ressources are limited, some of these non-criminal dark web site are going to disapear.
Re: Not all activity is illegetimate (Score:1)
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Yes to try something new and fresh and have a flavoured smoke.
Ever heard of a hookah ? It's a bong usually used to smoke "flavoured tobacco". So I wouldn't feel confident to put the 100% number out there, heck I know people who use tips and long leaves regardless of the cilinder's contents.
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I would like to point out that there are a lot more places that sell wraps than places that sell tobacco you could put in them. The ratio in my town is about 11:1 granted that's not 100% although it is approaching statistically insignificant.
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And not all tobaccoshops or nightshops sell them anyway. I would like to say it's 3:1 (tobacco store vs tobacco store with wraps).
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Cultural geographical differences... I image that the average US town is more like where I am a lot of places that sell wraps and very few that sell tobacco.
A hookah on the other hand is probably harder to come by since I rarely see them, although we used to have a Turkish restaurant with hookahs where you could get a smoke after dinner.
Re: Not all activity is illegetimate (Score:1)
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Not everyone who buys Zig Zag wraps is rolling a blunt either (only about 99.99% are.) What's your point?
Oh Gawd, they are going to crucify you since you messed up between joints and blunts. But your point is still valid.
If you use Tor, you are immediately interesting. If you have something new, it better use invisible packets, or it is only a matter of time before you are found out. The internet is an inherently insecure place. Perhaps some day people will understand that.
Re: Not all activity is illegetimate (Score:1)
Re: Not all activity is illegetimate (Score:2)
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The deep government has no problem charging you higher tax rates based on your opinions.
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So, I'd call TOR the "light grey market" of the web, just shady enough to slip past those who haven't bothered to shut it down yet.
It's also a good way to draw attention to yourself... very few people actually use it, so a search of just them is much more practical.
Cultural variance (Score:2)
It's also a good way to draw attention to yourself... very few people actually use it, so a search of just them is much more practical.
Depends on the region. Europe in general is much more privacy conscious. Specially some central / northern parts (E.g.: Germany, Switzerland).
Here you find people who use Tor regularily, just for the sake of keeping their life private.
You can thank these kind of people to help fill tor with background noise traffic.
Their are the one you make your reading of the anarchist cookbook less obvious
And who make "rounding up all tor users" completely impractical.
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I use Tor and VPN for contests and to change region pricing..
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Congratulations, you have made the list of "the usual suspects" as described in the film Casablanca.
What I'd like to see is some kind of analysis of TOR traffic vs normal internet traffic, not bytes up/down but connections made. I suspect it's less than 1%, which already makes it a better hunting ground for illicit activity, probably much less than 1% in reality.
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Well.. I also post "racist" (anti-refugee pro-myownculture & people) and anti-government stuff and back in the days tried to trigger Echelon on IRC :D, many years ago I used to send encrypted e-mails and ran an IRC server on LinkNet (SSL IRC mostly used by pirates) which I also used. I speak pretty open about what I think and as a younger person of myself I always used my correct name and e-mail because I thought that was how a society should be, that one should be free to say whatever one wanted and be
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I put myself on "the list" by direct application about 8 years ago: http://mangocats.com/stegamail... [mangocats.com]
nothing bad has happened, yet.
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What kind of 2107 message board has no edit function?!? - 5 ish years ago in 2012....
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There are lots of legitimate uses closer to home too. Looking up medical information that you wouldn't want traced back to you, for example. Pretty much anything you might use "private browsing" mode for, if you understand the limitations of it.
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I've never used Tor, but I used to use Freenet, and the bulk of it consisted of the following:
1. Piracy. Music, movies, anime, the usual.
2. Porn! Of course. Surprisingly, not much really bizarre and kinky stuff.
3. Crypto-anarchist enthusiasts and free-speech advocates.
4. Paranoid political nutters describing how the UN is going to use FEMA camps to incarcerate gun owners.
5. Paranoid religious nutters describing how the Beast will take over the government and force Christians to have gay sex.
I'm sure much mo
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Not 100% of what goes on the dark web is criminal.
Take tor as an example:
Yes, some of them use .onion tor web services for the purpose of hiding ethically-dubious criminal activities.
(silk road used to be an example back then).
BUT, some use them for very practical reason like evading censorship (though it is *still* considered illegal in some specific jurisdiction, globally it's not and it's hardly unethical).
Or, my main use for it: investigating sketchy links in spam. There's a fraction of these malware-serving web pages that specifically check for IP addresses belonging to companies and organizations that fight this stuff. I've found that if I curl the page normally, I get something entirely innocuous, but if I curl it through tor ... there's the malware.
Alas, most of them are now blocking tor exit nodes...
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Not 100% of what goes on the dark web is criminal.
... and not 100% of what is criminal should be criminal. I you want to use the dark web to buy recreational drugs, that should be nobody else's business, and I prefer you do that rather than patronize a local street dealer.
Re: Has the dark web shrunk 85%? (Score:5, Interesting)
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After the first report:
"HEY! I indexed all you guys who don't want to be indexed, because you tell me you don't want to be indexed!"
After the second report:
"If I ignore how much I ignored due to 'do not index me' requests, it looks like everybody is gone!"
Yeah, perhaps not the best methodology.
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Thank You.
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No 85% lighter.
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You don't like dark humor?
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The part they counted previously, is now 85% smaller when they recounted it
and the part that they didn't count previously is .... still not counted
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conduit, not end-point (Score:5, Interesting)
So now Dark Web means SMTP and FTP? Web? Web. *facepalm*
More seriously : Nope, not at all.
Dark Web has nothing to do with *what* you're talking to (usually websites, so usually HTTP/HTTPS),
but *how* you talk to (instead of opening a simple TCP connection between your laptop and a webserver, you send your request using some form of indirect complex hard-to-track routing. e.g.: TOR (The Onion Router)).
On the tor network, there are such things as tor servers which are accessed using a special address.
e.g.: Duck Duck Go has one [3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion].
From the outside, it doesn't look like your laptop is connecting to DDG's server.
It only looks like a bunch of tor nodes passing packets around.
At least in the case of Duck Duck Go, they also have an official DNS name that is registered to them, an IP address that can be backtraced to the server on the rack in the data-center where they are renting (or to the CDN that can then in turn further find them).
But some server only exist as obscure Tor keys. It's very hard to trace them in the real world.
Hence the name "Dark Web". The web of server that is hard to trace cause they don't work over plain vanilla TCP/IP.
Or perhaps they're 85% sneakier? (Score:2)
That's nothing, when I put my hands over my eyes 100% of the dark web goes away. I suspect that our methods are similar.
...and all of them are run by FBI (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:...and all of them are run by FBI (Score:5, Funny)
And they try to trap each other because they are run by different three letter agencies.
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The Internet: where men are men, women are men, and children are FBI agents.
Moved over to i2p (Score:4, Insightful)
Moved over to i2p. .onion is so, so, so, 2009.
Welcome to Conspiracy Theory Playhouse (Score:2)
Like good chocolate, the dark web has gone 85% darker.
The dark web found Darth Vader on Tinder, and has gone to the Dark Side.
The dark web has been replaced by FBI honeypots. Pay no attention to those FTP servers. It's totally legit. Honest. We pinky swear.
The dark web is actually a spoon, because the Sysadmin is Neo.
Kind of fun playing conspiracy theory playhouse, but on a serious note, fucking FTP? And we wonder why identities get stolen by by grade-school kids these days. Even the dark web can't le
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And any 1/2" fixed width spanner is always 65/128 in width causing round nuts.
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More like 1/16 actually, my math sucks today. Ignore me.
Perhaps the more relevant analysis is what percentage of the most popular websites on the internet have switched to HTTPS by default in recent years.
Re: Welcome to Conspiracy Theory Playhouse (Score:2)
Don't feel bad, 15/16ths of statistics are made up on the spot.
Are you sure? (Score:2)