What is the Dark Web and Why Would Businesses Use It?

Posted by Thomas Shaw on December 15th, 2019

There’s the World Wide Web, and then there’s the less understood and presumably nefarious Dark Web - but not all who make use of the Dark Web have malicious intent. So what's the Dark Web, and why would cybersecurity companies access underground exchanges in search of precious information and intellectual property when there is so much criminal activity going on there? Get additional facts about empire market onion



Layered inside the darkness are rays of intellectual light which might be hugely beneficial to organizations for any wide variety of causes. Numerous make the assumption that the Dark Web is bad, likely due to the connotation in the word “dark.” Couple that with all the capability for users to browse anonymously and do as they please with tiny to no consequence, and it’s understandable that the masses approach what lurks within the darkness from the anonymous web with trepidation.



What is the Dark Web?

Though some could envision probably the most heinous criminals intermingling in a kind of virtual haunted house, a 2017 academic study titled “Graph Theoretic Properties with the Dark Web” discovered that the Dark Web is a lot more a collection of dark silos than a web of connectivity. Researchers Virgil Griffith, Yang Xu and Carlo Ratti wrote that they analyzed the Dark Web “because it is an interesting unexplored data set” and “on the face of it, the World Wide Web as well as the Dark Web are immensely similar.”



Numerous believe that the key distinction in between the World Wide Web and its perceived underbelly could be the societies inhabiting every. The study found that inside the dark, there is a great deal less of a web that joins the society of users collectively. “Unlike the WWW, the Dark Web is often a location of isolation,” the researchers wrote.



However, not all who access the Dark Web are malicious. “There are essentially 4 dark nets,” stated Ran Geva, CEO of Webhose, in an interview. “The oldest and greatest one will be the Tor network, which was initially made by the U.S. Naval Analysis Laboratory to become a secure network for intel-gathering. There are actually three more: I2P, Zeronet and Freenet.” These that followed in Tor’s footsteps have been also developed for anonymity and details liberation, not for illicit purposes.



Who’s Surfing the Dark Web?

To make sure that your security controls don’t prohibit customers from being able to access details that could drive business productivity and really enhance your all round security posture, it is essential to understand the customers of your Dark Web. As an introvert, I’m inclined to view the Dark Web via a diverse lens. I appreciate the solitude and also the capability to look for data without becoming tracked, and I’m not alone. Customers from nations with censorship policies use the Dark Web to surf anonymously and reach content that is certainly otherwise difficult to discover.



People who wish to leak vital information and facts may possibly also make use of the Dark Web to publish sensitive details. Then you'll find users who just wish to browse the web with no being tracked. Furthermore, several trustworthy organizations leverage previously unindexed information via the Dark Web and use it to their advantage.