Unlock the Dark Web: A simple guide

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

To those of you who are new to this sort of thing, the dark web is an extra-municipal web beyond our regular internet (which is the website you reside in presently). It is somewhere Google and Bing don’t point you to; you have to use other gadgets to access it.

It’s a place where data leaks and illegal trades can occur, as well as rather legitimate, legal online activities users wish to perform without drawing the interest of the police or the government. It’s a Freenet-like extension to the Internet that is less shining and considerably more twilit, positive and negative alike.

Has this piqued your interest? In this post, I’ll outline how to access the Dark Web and what is available there. Although NRTC does not condone illicit activities, I will not explain how to do something that cannot be done.

The Dark Web tools and services

The dark web also has its selection of instruments and offerings: web browsers and search engines, which I will discuss in the following section. One of how the dark web is the dark web is that you can’t get to it with your regular web browser, nor can you search for something in it with Google.

Having a place on the internet that’s private and anonymous will of course encourage certain kinds of illicit activities: The dark web offers such things as hacking tools, drugs, fake passports, pornography, firearms, and so much more. It still feels a little like you have wandered into the ghetto of the closest real-world city, and all the business.

However, there are numerous legitimate, lawful and necessary reasons why people need to be private and anonymous online. The dark web is employed by journalists, whistleblowers, and political activists because they require the kind of protection that this network provides. If there is something you have to do that needs to be partially illegitimate for whatever moral high ground or low motivation, you can do it on the dark web.

To browse the Dark Web, You need the Tor Browser

Once upon a time, in the not-to-distant past, getting and using the dark web was anything but easy, you needed a specially made browser to do the trick, and the best of them, as many wills, the best of the best was Tor.

Tor is a browser designed to be more secure and private and can be used to access the everyday normal internet, or the dark net. Through blocking trackers, preventing user fingerprinting, encrypting data, and rerouting your browsing no one gets to know where you are in the world.

Tor is the sort of gateway to the dark web and there are even apps for the mobile operating systems, Android and iOS. The simple answer is no – but there are other browsers one perhaps could use to get on the dark Web: for most people, however, Tor is better because of the features said people will be able to use, and how straightforward the prosecution of using it is.

The Tor translation strictly relies on a unique concept known as onion routing technology. It gets its name from the way it puts several layers of obfuscation between you and the web, like the layers of an onion: Your traffic is routed through various nodes, and while the surfing is not very fast, it is very hard for someone else to discover your identity or your location.

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Still even with Tor and onion routing and all though you are not exactly out of the woods or out of prison as you could summarise it and ready to do whatever you feel like regardless of the consequences. Some aspects of your traffic may be easily sniffed at the entry/exit point of the node if those people running the nodes know what they are doing and what they are looking for. You are also vulnerable to threats like end-to-end correlation so even though it is way more secure and private, it ain’t safe at all.

A Dark Web search engine

Sure, open up Tor and you won’t be greeted by the glamorous and horrifying picture of the dark web. Of course, not only did I need the dark web browser, but I needed the efficient search engine of the dark web as well. This search engine will take you to the needed site and, although some dark web addresses can be typed directly – like type in standard web addresses – most are not easily identifiable.

The search engine integrated with the Tor Network is DuckDuckGo and after clicking the Onionize option in the search box, you can easily search for Dark Web links. These often have a name that ends with ‘.onion’ instead of some name like ‘.com’ as in the clear net.

Others which are also worthy of examination include; Ahmia, Torch, NotEvil, and Onion URL Directory—just as you type in some relevant keywords to what you want. Of these, some are accessed through routine WWW browsers, which are then needed to switch to using the Tor browser after obtaining the desired onion links.