A Possible Goodbye to the Dark Web
June 7, 2016
Should the Dark Web be eradicated? An article from Mic weighs in with an editorial entitled, Shutting Down the Dark Web Is a Plainly Absurd Idea From Start to Finish. Where is this idea coming from? Apparently 71 percent of internet users believe the Dark Web “should be shut down”. This statistic is according to a survey of over 24,000 people from Canadian think tank Centre for International Governance Innovation. The Mic article takes issue with the concept that the Dark Web could be “shut down”,
“The Dark Net, or Deep Web or a dozen other names, isn’t a single set of sites so much as a network of sites that you need special protocols or software in order to find. Shutting down the network would mean shutting down every site and relay. In the case of the private web browser Tor, this means simultaneously shutting down over 7,000 secret nodes worldwide. The combined governments of various countries have enough trouble keeping the Pirate Bay from operating right on the open web, never mind trying to shut down an entire network of sites with encrypted communications and hidden IP addresses hosted worldwide.”
The feasibility of shutting down the Dark Web is also complicated by the fact that there are multiple networks, such as Tor, Freenet or I2P, that allow Dark Web access. Of course, there is also the issue, as the article acknowledges, that many uses of the Dark Web are benign or even to further human rights causes. We appreciated a similar article from Softpedia, which pointed to the negative public perception stemming from media coverage of the takedown child pornography and drug sales site takedowns. It’s hard to know what isn’t reported in mainstream media.
Megan Feil, June 7, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Enterprise and Online Anonymity Networks
February 3, 2016
An article entitled Tor and the enterprise 2016 – blocking malware, darknet use and rogue nodes from Computer World UK discusses the inevitable enterprise concerns related to anonymity networks. Tor, The Onion Router, has gained steam with mainstream internet users in the last five years. According to the article,
“It’s not hard to understand that Tor has plenty of perfectly legitimate uses (it is not our intention to stigmatise its use) but it also has plenty of troubling ones such as connecting to criminal sites on the ‘darknet’, as a channel for malware and as a way of bypassing network security. The anxiety for organisations is that it is impossible to tell which is which. Tor is not the only anonymity network designed with ultra-security in mind, The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) being another example. On top of this, VPNs and proxies also create similar risks although these are much easier to spot and block.”
The conclusion this article draws is that technology can only take the enterprise so far in mitigating risk. Reliance on penalties for running unauthorized applications is their suggestion, but this seems to be a short-sighted solution if popularity of anonymity networks rise.
Megan Feil, February 3, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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