The Darknet

Now a quick question to you before proceeding to the contents of this blog; what do you usually use the internet for? Well, for me I would say that the internet actually serves as one of my main form of entertainment- besides going out with friends. I actually spend a lot of my time serving the net to look for websites for me to watch movies, searching for pictures of that one particular K-pop idol from a particular boyband or even to go on YouTube to watch countless of videos. Of course, I still use the net to look for informations for my assignments and also my FYP and also to stay connected with family and friends that I can’t see everyday.

From this, it looks like the net may seem to be the best thing that human beings have ever created as everything is literally at the click of our fingertips. As you can see from statistics, it shows that internet users in the world are increasing every single year. It’s like the internet is always under our control as we can use it however we like. However, is the internet really always good? Obviously the answer is a straight up no.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me present to you darknet, the evil twin of the internet. I read an article that perfectly describes the difference between the darknet and the internet; “if the internet is an ‘information superhighway’, then the darknet is a side street that does not appear on your GPS.” Through this particular sentence, it shows that is almost impossible for us to look for information of the darknet because it uses a different coding as compared to the World Wide Web.

So what is this darknet all about? Well the darknet is actually used for illegal activities. From weapons and drug trading to child pornography to whatever activities that are illegal. Again I quote the article, “the darknet is the playground for illegal activities.” Of course people will say that the internet is still a very good place that’s filled with unicorns and sprinkles cause they are not involved with any illegal activities. Well, let me lighten you up with another different story.

Google did a research and identified 780,000 of potential victims of off-the-shelf keyloggers, 12.4 million of potential victims to phishing kits and 1.9 billions of user’s username and password are actually available in the black market. It’s in fact just a matter of time before we get scam. Hackers are pretending to be big famous companies like eBay or Amazon to gain access to the user’s personal information by sending links to the users to reset passwords or saying that their account got hacked.

If this does not scare you enough, I am not sure what will. At least in the terms of the net. Many refers the internet to an iceberg; the small tip and visible part of the iceberg is the surface web but submerge beneath the ice, cold water is a very big chunk of ice which is bigger than the visible part is known as the deep web and dark net. Never underestimate the size of this ‘iceberg’ cause if you do, you’ll end up like the Titanic. So is the internet as good as it seems?