Everybody knows about the deep web and the dark web, but does everybody know the deep web really means?
The deep web is a portion part of the Internet, intentionally hidden from the search engines, with masked IP addresses and accessible only with a special web browser.
The first conflation of the terms “deep web” came in 2009 when the deep web search terminology was discussed alongside illegal activities taking place on the Freenet darknet
To organise a bit all the net, it is divided on levels from 0 to 6:
- Level 0 is the “Surface Internet”, where the user can enter using the standard browser and you can find for example, Google, Youtube, Facebook, Wikipedia… The 95% of the users navigate at this level.
- Level 1 is the “Surface Internet” too, but it has webs less known but with an easy access. This level is related mostly with a content not suitable for minors.
- Level 2 is not deep web yet, but it has some domains that we start to find with independent explorers, because they are not indexed in the standard search engines.
- Level 3 is already deep web. From this level, we need some tools to achieve to be anonymous, like for example TOR. Usually, when the user wants to navigate through these levels, they have to know the URL or IP of the webs, because they are not known web sites and they can only be accessed with an invitation. These domains are composed by aleatory characters, and it can be very difficult to be found by chance. On these webs we cannot see publicity and colours, and you can find from movies and books to children pornography, drug markets and weapons among others.
- Level 4 is defined by some webs like very dangerous and some even say that is not possible to enter with a useful proxy. It is said that it is plagued with hackers, real informatic pirates related to theft and embezzlement of data. Furthermore, we can find strongly encrypted pages from governments, and such macabre things as records of possible human experiments for the last four decades.
- At last we have levels 5 and 6, but we do not have enough information on the net. Some say that they are militar secrets, and that they can only be accessed by users with the sufficient knowledge due to the complicated encryption algorithms used.
The deep web can be used to commit criminal activities, so that your IP address is not traceable and you cannot be discovered by your physical location. The deep web is used too to protect your communications by the government or reveers that want to share large quantity of intern information to a journalist without leaving a trace. Dissidents of strict regimes that need to be on the anonymate if they want to be safe and let the world know what is really happening in their country aso trust in the deep web.
In addition, it can be used by some government institutions or big companies and multinationals that want to keep their own information and data without anyone being able to access it, and therefore, there are also hackers who are specialists on stealing “Top Secret” information to sell it to the competition, for example.
So, imagine all the things that can be found on the Internet, provided that the things that we can see are only 10% of all. It is scary.