
Right now there are only about 7000 active Dark Web sites – that’s one for every five people employed by the FBI. onion sites on the Dark Web and when a new one appears the chances are that its arrival is of interest to many, many different law enforcement agencies around the globe.

He’s facing up to 15 years in jail because he left his fingerprints on the gun.

All the encryption in the world couldn’t save US resident Michael Focia though. In October 2014, undercover agents purchased a firearm from a vendor on the Dark Web marketplace Agora. It takes some serious muscle to search the whole of that haystack but almost anyone can scan the entire Dark Web for sites with security flaws in just a few hours.Įven with your site locked down tight there are plenty of banana skins to slide on – all the anonymity in the world is worth nothing if you go and use a regular website like Reddit to tell everyone how terribly clever you are or you leave Exif data in your photos (the metadata that reveals when and where they were taken).Īnd then there’s the thorny business of actually selling real things to real people, with real addresses back in the well lit, real world. Your site can stand out a mile on the Dark Web too.Ī poorly secured website is vulnerable on any network but on the regular web it is at least a needle in a massive haystack of about 1 billion other sites. If the bad guys break in they’ll walk off with your Bitcoin stash, and if the good guys break in they’ll use their access to figure out who and where you are. On the Dark Web your website is a beacon of interest that needs to keep out both the bad guys and the good guys. onion website, does not make you akin to an elite hacker. Tor might be a very capable piece of technology built by very clever people but sophisticated tools are no match for operators who don’t know what they’re doing. Yup, there are in fact many ways to get busted on the Dark Web. The people trying to hide on the Dark Web occasionally open doors that let the light come flooding in, bump in to the person chasing them or accidentally annoy organisations that happen to own very powerful torches.

The reality is that while it’s hard to see in the dark, it’s not impossible to find things and over the last few years plenty of people who thought that Tor was a cloak of invisibility have come a cropper. That leaves law enforcement not knowing where the websites are, who owns them, who uses them or who to arrest. Users are anonymous and protected by a raft of privacy features baked directly into the Tor browser, which is the browser used to access it. It’s dark because it uses encryption to hide the locations of everything on it from everything else. The Dark Web is a small and secretive part of the regular web that’s become a haven for drug markets, paedophiles and sex traffickers.
