Dark Web - How to get started?

 Dark Web - How to get started?

You may ask yourself now, “Why would anybody be interested in the Dark Web besides Criminals and Drug dealers/users?” — Well, the answer is simple. The Dark Web is not only home to criminals, but it is also a vast resource for all kinds of legitimate content; it is used by whistleblowers in countries with oppressive Governments, by journalists that report in countries that try to censor or oppress free press, and it hosts a number of sites that you would also find on the clear web, such as Facebook, BBC, and more.

 

Personally, I never surf the dark web from my day-to-day PC/Mac — I use VMs for that, and I only use the VM’s once. For average users, that may be overhead, but I would still highly recommend using a Virtual Machine for accessing the Dark Web. I created a video some time ago on how to use CSI Linux via the Whonix Gateway securely; this is still my main Distro for investigations. You can check out the Video here: https://youtu.be/No-Utte8Iv0

Installing TOR:

Theoretically, all you need to access the Dark Web is a Computer, the Internet, and the TOR Browser. What is the TOR Browser? The Tor Browser is a web browser that anonymizes your web traffic using the Tor network, making it easier to protect your identity online. Do not think the TOR browser guarantees full anonymity and safety; the Reality is far from that and very complex. I will write about the dangers of compromised exit nodes in the TOR Network in the future. The core principle of Tor, onion routing, was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag to protect American intelligence communications online.

For now, what we need to do is to download the TOR browser from the TOR Project Website and install it. After we start the TOR browser for the first time, it will connect to the TOR Network. When we are done with that, let’s change the security level. By default, the Security Level in TOR is set to standard, but if we are going to explore the Dark Web, I recommend we change that. To do this, we can use the Security Level Settings.

After this, we are good to go to check our first dark web site. But how do we find one?  so we will see 2 popular ways of finding .onion sites (.onion is the domain ending for hidden services sites, also known as onion sites or dark web sites)

DuckDuckGo:

DuckDuckGo, to some, is a search engine; it has a clear web presence and a hidden service presence.

From here, you can start searching for content as you like. However, the dark web is not as simple to search as the clear web really, and this is where onion link sites come in, which brings us to the second option I want to mention here.

 TheHiddenWikki:

The HiddenWikki is a collection of onion links. You can check it out here: https://thehiddenwiki.org/ — As with any darkweb site. Excerxise common sense as scams are certainly out there.

-Shubham Patil

  Chief Coding Skill Developer