Slashdot Mirror
The Dark Web Has Shrunk By 85% (bleepingcomputer.com)
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.
Or has it became 85% darker?
So now Dark Web means SMTP and FTP? Web? Web. *facepalm*
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.
There is no dark web these are probably all honeypots :)
Sites that are openly dark in plain sight.
Moved over to i2p. .onion is so, so, so, 2009.
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The dark web has been replaced by FBI honeypots.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 learn to be secure.
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.
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I have the same problem when I go swimming in cold water.
Isn't the point of the "Dark Web" is that it is obfuscated? You can count all the things you know about, but how can you count the things you don't know about?
I don't need hundreds or thousands of sites. I have found one, good, reliable market. This all you really need. I don't need much: drugs and hacked log-ins to porn sites.
Does it still work the same as before? Uh, yes. So, what's the problem?
It's hard to believe that they have the ability to discover most darknet sites. If you discover them, sure, you can atttempt to crawl them and try various tricks to learn about them, but what's the step before that?
Are they spidering from some well-known central directories, just following links? That can't work. Are they "wardialing" addresses? I don't get it. It's hard enough to even survey the non-dark net!
“So this is how liberty dies–with thunderous applause.”
The tools of revolution may be useful for crime but are necessary for revolution.
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.
Or watching porn, if you don't want every single agency to learn your weird fetishes...
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
...and the rats retreat to the shadows.
It's no longer the 'Dark Web' if everyone knows what it is and how to get on it.
I come back after all these years and it's basically dead. What a sorry pathetic end to a once great site.
Bitcoins keep going up, but it's hard to believe that value is driven by real world uses, is that incorrect? Asking as a real question, not a statement.
I'd thought the rising price meant a thriving dark web where the currency needed to exchange there was becoming more in demand. So either that isn't the reason for the rising value, or perhaps the dark web is indeed darker than we think?
Ha ha!