A few days ago, I was fortunate(?) enough to talk about the dark web with a friend and the conversation made me realised that a lot of people are still clueless when it comes to the dark web and would still believe in many debunked misconceptions. Ultimately I originally had planned to write a guide-ish in navigating the dark web as the act is super simple and not at all as “hacker-like” as most people make it out to be, but ultimately I feel that it’s important to clear out these misconceptions first before making the guide, so this post serves more as a part 1 of the guide so to speak.
Also worth noting that I might throw the term “onion” or “onion domain” where for those that aren’t in the know, dark web runs on onion domain as oppose to your typical .com, so a lot of the link would end with .onion instead of, say, .com, as simple as that really.
To put it simply, deep web is essentially just sites or services that aren’t indexed by your typical search engines (Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc). An example that I can give is Gmail where the site itself is indexed and easily searchable, but to use the service you’d need to input in your credentials, in this case being your email and password to access your emails. Another example is data on cloud storage such as Google Drive & OneDrive where you can go to the site just fine, but nobody else is able to access your data unless they have your email and password.
Dark web meanwhile is best explained as a hidden part of Internet that isn’t typically accessible to normal users due to requiring special software, that is being tor. Dark web is usually what most people would think about when they think of marketplaces selling services and illegal goods. In essence, all dark web is in deep web, but most of deep web contents aren’t in dark web.
This is very false as really the only thing that you’d need is tor which is easy to search for and install. Obviously, you’d still need to find a way to go to these dark web sites, so using dark web wikis which would list down known sites on the dark web and/or a search engine that can search for onion sites are recommended (e.g. Phobos). But really for the most part that’s about it, you don’t need any fancy gadgets, high-tech gear or an extreme knowledge of computers to access the dark web. If anything, it isn’t really any difficult than normal browsing.
Random online sites and Internet users absolutely love to chime in the fact that you should absolutely use a vpn alongside tor for increased anonymity and while they aren’t exactly wrong per say, the usage of vpn and tor at the same time may do more harm than good. This is primarily because most users don’t really know how to properly set them up which may result in you leaking traffic during your browsing, thus making the usage of tor redundant. I’d just say that if you don’t know what you’re doing then just don’t bother with a vpn and just fully stick with tor.
The main purpose of using tor is not to browse for illicit materials, but instead for anonymity & bypassing censorships. Due to the strong anonymity that comes from using tor, individuals that may be tracked or are working in places that are under heavy surveillance (e.g. journalists & whistleblowers) may use tor as the traffic that runs through tor is (usually) not easily linked back to you and thus they can browse relatively worry-free. Regarding the dark web, normal-ish forums and sites exist as well since purchasing an onion domain is typically cheaper than actual domain and some people might prefer it as it feels more “exclusive”.
Contrary to popular beliefs, you do not immediately be hacked upon navigating the dark web as just like with browsing the clear web, the most important thing is not your operating system, but instead your brain where if something looks sketchy then it might be sketchy. Generally, it might be harder to tell with most dark web content, but if you restrict most permissions and use common sense then you should be mostly “fine”. “Fine” and not fine as there are still ways to de-anonymise tor users in which if you’re that paranoid then you should preferably run Linux and/or browse tor in a virtual machine but honestly based on my own experience then you’d typically be just fine if you play it safe.
A lot of people have heard of the fact that you can buy services and illegal goods from the dark web and while this is true, a bunch of these services can just be plain scams where the people behind it will just take your money and run away with it, or even worse a honeypot (or in layman’s term, a trap) that is possibly organized by federal officers or vigilantes in order to catch people that are trying to purchase illicit goods & services. Most famous being the selling of hitman services where if you’d try to purchase a hit on someone then good chance the seller would just report you to the local authorities. In a way you can dumb it down as the wild west where pretty much anything goes.
Well, somewhat. While it’s true that most transactions on the dark web run on crypto & bunch of them accept bitcoin, this is not because bitcoin is secure or untraceable, but it’s instead due to the popularity of bitcoin. Obtaining bitcoin anonymously while possible, can certainly be a challenge as literally anyone can search up for bitcoin trackers (they are even available to be viewed on the clearnet) and just like that the entire bitcoin exchanges can be tracked. If you want to make a purchase on the dark web, then something like Monero is typically preferable due to them being difficult to trace. Ultimately, any form of transaction would be easy to trace if you don’t practice good opsec anyways, e.g. purchasing monero from a store that requires kyc (know your customer).
Some users that are bit more tech-savvy than others might have noticed that Brave browsers have tor baked into the browser & might even use it to browse the dark web. While it’s something that you can certainly use, I wouldn’t really recommend anyone to seriously use it. This is simply because of how the way tor works, which is anonymity via the act of standardisation, in simpler term, a site is usually able to detect what browser you’re using alongside a myriad of other things (see: device info). This by itself is already a huge worry as simple act of having 5 extensions installed as opposed to 4 is detectable and if you further fine-tuned your browser then most likely your browser would be super unique and thus easily identifiable. Tor browser semi-work around this where you just have to download the browser and can immediately use it out of the box. Tinkering with the tor browser is not recommended as it’d make you more unique and thus would stand out a lot more compared to other people which defeat the point of using tor for anonymity.
Now with all this information, it’s exactly why I wouldn’t recommend the act of using other browsers to browse the dark web. Not only would this make your info stood out like crazy, but these browsers probably don’t have the security and privacy features of tor browsers installed/enabled anyways which may resulted with you being an easier prey for hacking attempts. If you want to use it just to open a normal onion link that you know is safe, then sure, but using it to browse the dark web is something that I’d largely recommend against.
I believe that I should have covered most of the misconceptions surrounding dark web and its user, if I miss anything then I might update the post, or not, we’ll see. Either way I don’t really have much to say other than how crazily overblown tor and dark web is to the average people that doesn’t know any better lol, though honestly with just about anything be sure to proceed with caution and when in doubt just flee as it's better to just not risk something with potential unfavourable outcome.