User:ImSmartTrustMePls/sandbox

''This article is about darkweb websites. For the part of the Internet not accessible by traditional web search engines, see'' Deep web

Dark Web
The dark web is the World Wide Web content that exists on darknets, overlay networks that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access. The dark web forms a small part of the deep web, the part of the Web not indexed by web search engines, although sometimes the term deep web is mistakenly used to refer specifically to the dark web.

The darknets which constitute the dark web include small, friend-to-friend peer-to-peer networks, as well as large, popular networks like Tor, Freenet, I2P, and Riffle operated by public organizations and individuals. Users of the dark web refer to the regular web as Clearnet due to its unencrypted nature. The Tor dark web may be referred to as onionland, a reference to the network's top-level domain suffix .onion and the traffic anonymization technique of onion routing.

The dark web has often been confused with the deep web, which refer to the parts of the web not indexed (searchable) by search engines. This confusion dates back to at least 2009. Since then, especially in reporting on Silk Road, the two terms have often been conflated, despite recommendations that they should be distinguished.

Onion routing
It 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. There are methods to break the anonymity of this technique, e.g. timing analysis.

Hacking groups and services
Many hackers sell their services either individually or as a part of groups. Such groups include xDedic, hackforum, Trojanforge, Mazafaka, dark0de and the TheRealDeal darknet market. Some have been known to track and extort apparent pedophiles. Cyber crimes and hacking services for financial institutions and banks have also been offered over the Dark web. Attempts to monitor this activity have been made through various government and private organizations, and an examination of the tools used can be found in the Procedia Computer Science journal. Use of Internet-scale DNS Distributed Reflection Denial of Service (DRDoS) attacks have also been made through leveraging the Dark Web. There are many scam .onion sites also present which end up giving tools for download that are infected with trojan horses or backdoors.

Bitcoin services
Bitcoin services such as tumblers are often available on Tor, and some – such as Grams – offer darknet market integration. A research study undertaken by Jean-Loup Richet, a research fellow at ESSEC, and carried out with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, highlighted new trends in the use of Bitcoin tumblers for money laundering purposes. A common approach was to use a digital currency exchanger service which converted Bitcoin into an online game currency (such as gold coins in World of Warcraft) that will later be converted back into money.