Dark Web Turns 20: From Black Markets to Facilitating

The dark web, that part of the internet that criminals, dissidents, drug dealers, and hackers use to exchange information and buy and sell products and services securely and anonymously will turn 20 years old this month.

Generally speaking, in point of fact, the dark web is defined as all the content hosted on the markets or online networks that require a certain browsing software to access.

It is a subsection of the deep web, meaning search engines like Google or Bing do not index it; thus, it is less transparent and tougher to scrutinize.

The dark web is most widely used as a black marketplace trading post where people sell drugs, counterfeit documents, credit cards, and data stolen in illegal breaches.

Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, have conducted sting operations on criminal activities on the dark web, arresting and charging many criminals, but illegal activities continue to increase.

The anonymity the dark web has accorded not only furthers the growth of the illicit underground but also provides a venue for activists and political dissidents to plan their moves with minimal government scrutiny.

Governments worldwide have attempted to ban encrypted servers. In return, the activists have also taken up a liking for encryption tools.

Meanwhile, the use of the dark web has grown steadily during the past decade. Tor, one of the most used encrypted routers, now hosts about 80,000 unique sites according to its internal numbers.

The dark web shaped the world, both online and off, in two short decades since it came into existence. Many of these events have been cataloged by GroupSense, a cybersecurity company monitoring dark web activity.

Here’s a look back at some of the things it impacted the most.

March 2000: Freenet, the first widely available, anonymous file-sharing system, goes live.

Freenet was founded in 1999 as a student by Ian Clarke, an Irish programmer studying at the University of Edinburgh, and was released broadly in March 2000.

Like many of the early pioneers of the internet, Clarke felt that through it, information sharing would become a free-for-all and copyright could well be an obsolete concept.

“If this whole thing catches on, I think that people will look back in 20 to 40 years and look at the idea that you can own information in the same way as gold or real estate in the same way we look at witch-burning today,” Clarke told The New York Times shortly after Freenet’s launch.

August 2004: The US Navy releases the code for Tor, aka the onion router.

Tor, the most generally used dark web software, was first developed beginning in the 1990s by the Office of Naval Research and DARPA as a tool for protecting encrypted, military communications.

In 2004, the Naval Research Lab made the code publicly available, after which the Tor Project nonprofit took over management of the software.

January 2009: Satoshi Nakamoto publishes version 0.1 of Bitcoin and opens a new frontier in online encrypted payment systems.

As encrypted servers set the upper limit for truly anonymous information sharing, bitcoin staked a claim for the promise of anonymous money transfers.

While Bitcoin transfers immediately became a hotbed for money laundering, they also had a huge impact on the market in the following years.

One bitcoin was worth a few dollars for years, then skyrocketed to a peak of $20,000 per bitcoin in 2017. Today, one bitcoin is worth about $6,000.

2010–2013: The dark web becomes an information-sharing hub for Arab Spring revolutionaries.

When social media and online forums were fanning the revolution across North Africa and the Middle East in the early 2010s, the dark web became a sanctuary for organisers to share information freely without government scrutiny.

Activists and dissidents used Tor to exchange information on remedies for tear gas, organize protests, and get around censorship.

The trend reportedly continued into the years that followed, including during the Syrian revolution.

February 2011: The first dark-web marketplace, Silk Road, is founded by Ross Ulbricht.

The first dark web market, Silk Road, went online in 2011. The site, which primarily catered to the sale of illegal drugs, experienced a surge in traffic in the months after Gawker’s Adrian Chen documented the drug trade going on there.

It was shut down by federal authorities in 2013; its founder, Ross Ulbricht, was arrested. He was subsequently convicted of drug trafficking charges, apart from others, and sentenced to life in jail without parole.

May 2012: LinkedIn suffers a data breach in which the personal information of 117 million people has been shared on the dark web.

The breach included not only the theft of people’s login credentials but all personal information associated with their accounts. It didn’t come to light for years and was the biggest breach in LinkedIn’s history.

2013: Around 3 billion Yahoo accounts are compromised in a breach, with credentials shared on the dark web.

All existing Yahoo accounts were compromised in the 2013 attack, which wasn’t found until almost three years later.

But the revelation of the 2013 breach earlier that year nearly derailed the deal and knocked $350 million off of Verizon’s initial offer for Yahoo, which eventually sold to Verizon in 2017 for $4.48 billion.

2015: ISIS begins using the dark web as an organizing tool.

The Islamic State’s rapid growth in power during the mid-2010s was greatly aided by the terrorist group’s embrace of all online channels available.

That included Twitter and Facebook, which were closely watched by US intelligence and the dark web, where the group could escape scrutiny.

In 2015, then-FBI Director James Comey called for regulation that would put “back doors” in place on encrypted services.

Federal agencies have continued that push, but tech companies have been resistant to building backdoors, arguing they would weaken security across the board.

2017: In an episode of hacker “civil war,” one of the biggest hosting sites of the dark web went offline and knocked out more than 10,000 services.

In 2017, Freedom Hosting II, a provider hosting more than 10,000 Tor sites, was taken offline by a rogue hacker, knocking out around a fifth of the whole dark web.

The hacker claimed to have attacked the site because Freedom Hosting II had become an outsize hub for sharing child pornography, claiming in an interview with Vice that they identified more than 30 GB of child porn after the takedown.

2017–2023: Law enforcement launches a more successful crackdown on dark web crime, driving threat actors to abandon the service in favor of encrypted messaging apps.

Until its takedown in 2017, AlphaBay-a, a dark-web trading market ballooned to roughly ten times the size of Silk Road during its prime.

As the noose from law enforcers gets tighter against dark web providers, hackers, and contraband traders are moving operations on encrypted messaging apps, such as Telegram and WhatsApp, that promise end-to-end encryption and include access to tools designed to forward messages to larger groups of people while remaining anonymous.