The terms ‘deep web’ and ‘dark web’ are sometimes used interchangeably, but they are two entirely different things. The main difference is that the Deep Web contains information that is hard to find, or impossible to find, with search engines while the Dark Web contains a lot of illegal activity. In either case, you should only visit them anonymously.
What Is The Deep Web?
The Deep Web is below the “surface”, which means that it is not indexed by any of the search engines. Nothing on the Deep Web will show up in Google results or any other search engine results. Sometimes because the search engines are banned, also because there are no hyper-links to the files and materials that reside in the Deep Web. Some experts estimate that over 90% of the web is actually “deep” leaving only a small fraction of the web available to a standard web browser. If you want to see the Deep Web, you will need a special browser named: TOR. TOR is available for free at: https://www.torproject.org
What Is The Dark Web?
The Dark Web is totally different than the Deep Web. Normal web browsers can not access the Dark Web because the Dark Web sites end with .onion instead of the standard endings like: .com, .org, or .gov. Dark Web (.onion) sites are not included in the Domain Name System, (DNS). The only way to access the Dark Web is with a specialized browser known as TOR. TOR is available for free at: https://www.torproject.org
What is On The Dark Web?
Some of the data on the dark web might be stolen information. Whenever you hear of a major data breach, there is a good chance that some of that data will be available on the dark web. However, “stolen” is nothing compared to some of the other materials on the Dark Web. A few items that are more dangerous are: plastic explosives, hacked paypal accounts, all sorts of drugs, rocket launchers, and swat-grade body armor. That is just a few of the crazy things for sale on the Dark Web.
How To Safely Browse The Deep Web And Dark Web
In order to browse either the Deep Web or the Dark Web, you will need the TOR browser. It is available for free, links are given above. TOR installs very easily and looks like a normal Firefox browser. Once TOR is up and running, you can visit some of the Dark sites, but you need to know the name of the site first. With your regular browser, search for ‘list of dark web sites” or something similar. Copy some of the names somewhere so you can access them later. Open TOR and type in one of those names. If you can find a dark search engine or dark directory that will help you in the future. There are forums listed in Google where the Dark Web is discussed in detail.
Using a VPN Increases Your Anonymity
There are two ways of utilizing your VPN with the Dark Web. First, you can start up TOR and then connect to your VPN. Second, is just the opposite, connect to your VPN, then start up and connect with TOR. There are pros and cons to both methods that are mostly technical in nature so we won’t go into all that detail.