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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.
True! I doubt that they have simply gone off-line. They must have found some other system since they know TOR has been compromised.
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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.
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I briefly skimmed the OnionScan report when /. ran a story about the site a few months (?) ago. IIRC, her whitepapers said her scan did things like honor robots.txt and had other selectors for what would be indexed. The report was discussed on darkweb sites, not surprising if dark web operators took measures to not be indexed on principle.
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.