So, what exactly IS the Dark Web?
If you’ve been staying up to date with this year’s trend of data breaches, you might have heard the name “Dark Web” or “Deep Web” popping up here and there, and wondered exactly what it was and what it had to do with data privacy.
The Dark Web is an immense underlayer of the deepest part of the Internet that isn’t crawled and indexed by search engines like Google.
If you picture the Internet like an iceberg, you could divide it into three categories: the “surface web,” the Deep Web, and the Dark Web. The tip of the iceberg represents the “surface web” (the stuff we use every day, like Facebook or YouTube, DIY videos, which are indexed), a portion of the underlayer is the Deep Web (parts of the Internet comprised of unstructured data and temporary pages hidden by passwords), and a portion of that underlayer — the deepest part of it that’s hidden beneath the cold and murky water via passwords and exclusive invites — represents the Dark Web.
And why should we be worried About It?
The Dark Web is as shifty as the name sounds.
And yes, it’s the place where — among the plethora of both legal and illegal activities that take place upon its many-layered interface — stolen data is often listed and sold.
So if you’ve been a victim of a data breach and had your sensitive information stolen, the Dark Web might be the place where that stolen data has ended up.
You probably already know that 2018 has brought us a painful number of data breaches. Maybe you’ve already been a victim and maybe you haven’t, but there’s no doubt that you’ve probably submitted your private data to corporate entities a dozen times over by shopping with your credit card or starting a Netflix account with the same login/password combo that you always use (even though we know we shouldn’t).
The Dark Web is worrying for multiple reasons — not only is it a prime location for illegal buying, trading, and selling, but the way it is set up makes it extremely difficult for officials to find and charge these criminals.
The layers and layers of anonymity pose a serious threat to those entities that have massive amounts of data in their possession.