RESEARCH IN THE DEEP WEB

Outline■ The Surface Web VS the Deep Web

■ Deep Web vs Dark Web

■ How to get deeper

■ Dark Web access

■ Tools

Surface Web

Anything that can be indexed by a typical search engine.

Deep Web■ Quality content is 1,000 to 2,000 times greater than surface web

■ 95% of Deep Web is accessible to public (no fees or subscription required)

■ The deep web is the internet that has not been indexed by commercial search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. These search engines send out crawlers or spiders to index and catalog available web sites, but the vast majority of the internet, 500X the surface net, includes many of the best resources which are not indexed by these search engines. Such as:

– Unlinked pages: Spiders can’t find web pages that are not linked to others. – Private intranets and web pages, password protected and more.– Non HTML content: e.g., content rich, lots of different file type– Library & Government Databases -How Stuff Works.com

Types of deep web

■ Invisible Web: Material that can be, but is not included in search engine results. EG: new material added and not yet picked up.

■ Private Web: Sites intentionally excluded from search engine results. Ex: password protected

■ Subscriptions websites & databases: ESPN Insider, (Library Databases) Proquest databases, EbscoHost. -How Stuff Works.com

How to get deeper■ Directories

– http://www.dmoz.org/

■ Specialized Search Engines– http://biznar.com/biznar/desktop/en/search.html– http://www.wolframalpha.com/– http://archive.org/web/web.php

■ Academic Databases– Jstor– Science Direct

■ Specialized Databases– https://www.archives.gov/

■ Government Websites– https://www.data.gov/– https://www.govinfo.gov/

The Dark Web

■ The Dark web: An area of the web which information is hidden deep and anonymously.

■ The Dark Web then is a small portion of the Deep Web that has been intentionally hidden and is inaccessible through standard web browsers.

"The deep Web may be a shadow land of untapped potential, but with a bit of skill and some luck, you can illuminate a lot of valuable information that many people worked to archive. On the dark Web, where people purposely hide information, they'd prefer it if you left the lights off.

The dark Web is a bit like the Web's id. It's private. It's anonymous. It's powerful. It unleashes human nature in all its forms, both good and bad.

The bad stuff, as always, gets most of the headlines. You can find illegal goods and activities of all kinds through the dark Web. That includes illicit drugs, child pornography, stolen credit card numbers, human trafficking, weapons, exotic animals, copyrighted media and anything else you can think of. Theoretically, you could even, say, hire a hit man to kill someone you don't like.

But you won't find this information with a Google search. These kinds of Web sites require you to use special software, such as The Onion Router, more commonly known as Tor.

Tor is software that installs into your browser and sets up the specific connections you need to access dark Web sites. Critically, Tor is an encrypted technology that helps people maintain anonymity online. It does this in part by routing connections through servers around the world, making them much harder to track." -How Stuff Works.com

“Tor is a program you can run on your computer that helps keep you safe on the Internet. It protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. This set of volunteer relays is called the Tor network (Tor Project)”

How Tor works

■ The Tor network is a volunteer-operated servers that individuals use to improve privacy and security.

■ Tor connects through masked virtual links instead of a direct connection.

■ Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer network consisting of more than seven thousand relays to conceal a user's location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis (How Stuff Works).

The Onion Router

“Onion routing is a technique for anonymous communication over a computer network. In an onion network, messages are encapsulated in

layers of encryption, analogous to layers of an onion. The encrypted data is transmitted through a series of network nodes called onion routers, each of which "peels" away a single layer, uncovering the data's next

destination. When the final layer is decrypted, the message arrives at its destination. The sender remains anonymous because each intermediary

knows only the location of the immediately preceding and following nodes” (Tor (anonymity network)

Hidden Service

“Tor makes it possible for users to hide their locations while offering various kinds of services, such as web publishing or an instant

messaging server. Using Tor "rendezvous points," other Tor users can connect to these hidden services, each without knowing the other's

network identity (Tor project).”

Why■ Privacy

– Protect from traffic analysis■ Traffic analysis is the process of intercepting and examining messages in order

to deduce information from patterns in communication. It can be performed even when the messages are encrypted and cannot be decrypted.

– Personal Privacy from government privacy abuse– Identity thieves– Unscrupulous marketers– Protect communication from corporations– Skirt censorship

■ Whistleblowing & news leaks– Chinese journalist communicate on Tor

Tips

■ 1.) Don’t Download anything.

■ 2.) Don’t go to illegal sites (Duh).

■ 3.) Never pay with any credit card.

■ 4.) However, if you are going to use it because of personal privacy concerns, also be aware of the dangerous e.g., illegal material, viruses, and slow websites!

References

■ How the Deep Web Works:http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/how-the-deep-web-works.htm■ Who uses Tor:https://www.torproject.org/about/torusers.html.en■ Tor (anonymity network)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28anonymity_network%29