Pierluigi Paganini April 11, 2016

Recently the intelligence firms Intelliagg and Darksum have issued an interesting report on the Dark Web and related mapping.

We have discussed several times about Deep Web and Dark Web, discussing the reason why the hidden part of the web is even more dangerous.

However the darknets aren’t a prerogative of criminal organizations, a good portion of the content it host is legal as demonstrated by a recent global survey commissioned by the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).

The research demonstrates that 71% consider necessary the shut down of the dark net (36% strongly/35% somewhat), likely because the hidden part of the web is associated in the headlines with criminal activities.

Another interesting result emerged from the research is that citizens in some countries are much more likely than others to believe the “dark net” should be shut down. Indonesia (85%) and India (82%) lead the ranking, followed by Mexico (80%), China (79%), Egypt (79%). Bringing up the rear are Kenya (61%), South Korea (61%) and Sweden (61%).

It is not clear in fact if people interviewed were made aware of the legal usage of dark net before answering the question.

The Dark Web is a place crowded of cyber criminals and hackers that host the most popular black markets, but it a serious mistake to forgot that it is also a precious environment for journalists, activists, whistleblowers and political dissidents that escape from the censorship and repression.

The experts used a spider software to crawl the Tor network and collect the information used in the study.

“We compiled our census of the dark web using the Darksum ‘collection software’, a ‘spider’ or software application that crawls through the web following links in order to compile an index of its pages, and Intelliagg’s ‘machine-learning intelligence classification system’ – complex algorithms that are ‘trained’ by humans then sent off to classify data automatically.” states the report.

“Our classification system was ‘trained’ using data that had been classified manually from 1,000 sites on the dark web. It proceeded to classify the remaining data automatically without human supervision. This automated method proved to be 94% as accurate as it would have been had this process been entirely done by hand, meaning that nine times out of 10 our algorithms came to the same conclusion as an experienced analyst”

The experts run their spiders two weeks in February 2016 focusing their analysis on selected dark web services, including pornography, fake documentation services, drugs, carding sites, financial fraud sites, weapons, blogs.