Cybersecurity

The Dark Web Is Too Slow and Annoying for Terrorists

Terrorists are skulking around the dark web, the bit of the internet that can only be accessed by specific software, propagating messages of hate and extremism, right? Not really, according to data gathered by Thomas Rid and Daniel Moore of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.“The one thing that was surprising was that there was so little militant, extremist presence. Only a handful of sites,” Rid told Quartz.
The two designed a system to crawl “hidden services” on Tor, the network of computers that obfuscates the identities of those connected to it, to try to categorize the content found on those hidden sites. A Tor hidden-service has an address that ends in .onion, like this one–https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion–which points to DuckDuckGo’s hidden-service (here’s Facebook’s one). It has to be accessed by the Tor browser, a piece of free software that lets users view hidden services while keeping their identity hidden under multiple layers of encryption. People who run a hidden service can’t be easily identified either.