Tech

World Wide Wut – The State of the Sketchball Internet

Kοινοποίηση

Last year there was a lot of buzz surrounding “the Deep Web” due to a viral Gawker article exposing the Silk Road, an anonymous drug marketplace. This was shortly after Inception came out so people were already hyped about “going deeper” into things. The existence of such an accessible black market outraged parents, politicians, and local news syndicates, but could anyone actually do anything to stop it? In order to understand the impact of this viral event it’s worth it to do a bit of spelunking, post-factum.

To clear up some misconceptions, the Deep Web is hundreds of times larger than the “surface net” we all know and love, and is growing at a faster rate. In fact, most of the internet is composed of deep web matter. Not even Google itself has the capacity to crawl it, so its content exists in the most remote reaches of the internet. It’s everything from innocuous web pages that don’t index to government data like the stuff Wikileaks finds. The juicy parts live on hidden anonymity networks like freenet and tor.

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My first encounter with tor was freshman year of college. I used it to bypass annoying network logins and to torrent in my dorm without IT getting on my case. It’s used in countries like China to view censored media without risk of execution. More famously, it serves as a data haven for taboo content and nefarious e-commerce. The system has known vulnerabilities so it’s not guaranteed that you won’t get in trouble if you try to do those things. And you can still find virtually any drug you want on the Silk Road. The bitcoin itself is significantly less volatile compared to its exchange rate in the months following the media frenzy. I got a quote of $140 for an ounce of AK47, $95 for a gram of meth, and $60 for a gram of MDMA at 86% purity.

Also, hacking services are available for email, social network accounts, bank accounts, credit cards, and Paypal for negotiable rates. You can buy 0day exploits, trojans, and many different kinds of key loggers. DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service Attacks) start at around $100 dollars for a standard host and are more expensive as the risk increases to large companies and government sites.

Fraudulent Credit Cards and IDs are easy to come by on tor; you can buy at bulk rates, called dumps. For $40-$80 you can buy a US driver’s license from any state you want. Identity theft info starts at about $7 and you get everything you want, including social security number. European and Canadian passports go for about $750-$1,500. You can have your bitcoins laundered at the rate of 1% of the total amount by “The Bitcoin Washing Machine.”

Through the assassination market you can allegedly contract killings starting at $20,000. The rate increases accordingly as the level of celebrity of the intended target does. If you are looking for a more hands-on approach, a 9mm Berretta, for example, goes for about $1,000. Or you can buy 500mg of Ricin poision for $40. If you want to disappear and start a new life you can do that too for $5,000.

Pedophiles make up a portion of the population on tor. Although Anonymous famously took down one of the largest child porn sites on tor this past October, it doesn’t seem to have made much of a dent. The deep web is home to all kinds of taboo porn as well: snuff, bestiality, cannibalism, mutilation, and a site called “Ladies Pooping.” There’s some dated Literotica about meeting people from AOL and infecting them with HIV.

All types of paranoid people inhabit the Deep Web. Terrorist handbooks and conspiracy theories are commonplace. There’s a website that claims to inject pregnant human specimens with bleach as an experiment trial and another that claims to have Osama Bin Laden’s porn collection. These sites exist to remind us of the fact that Deep Web surfers are lying perverts.

There’s some normal stuff on the Deep Web though too. I found a huge collection of green frog clip art, pirated mp3s and some ordinary art portfolio sites.

As for repercussions, I didn’t find much evidence of any yet, at least by law enforcement. However, the NSA did just spend $2 billion on the biggest surveillance data center ever, for the main purpose of monitoring the Deep Web and solving advanced encryption. It’s really too early to say what this means—it opens up shop next year in Utah.

What to expect in response? A tightened, more secure invisible net or a black market blowout sale.

Previously – Lurking on the Palace

@yeahimfreaky