The DarkNet Report

By : Mohamed Saeed Abd-Elhamid

Sec : 6
th
Year :3 year Computer Science Dept.
Presented To : DR .Mohamed El-dosuky
Contents:
1. Introduction
2. The Network Surveillance
3. What is the Darknet (Illegal Hidden Services)
4. Internet vs Deep web vs Darknet
1. Introduction:
Darknet : Its the place where so many illegal activities take
place on the internet such as selling drugs, hiring murders,
piracy, pornography, gambling and all kind of fraud etc.
Tor Browser is praised for providing that strong privacy and
anonymity by computer security researchers and agencies of
the NSA who said:
Its the King of high-secure, low-latency internet
anonymity.
But on the other hand Its not 100% secure specially for close
and manually monitoring of Tor Browser users and some other
means such as targeting outdated versions of Firefox

browsers codenamed Egotistical Giraffe or implementing a

vulnerable software on a Tor users computer, Tor network has
also suffered a great attack known as the Operation
Onymous which has been led by the some security agencies
such as FBI, NSA, DHS, DEA and more other law
enforcements to shut down some black markets in the Darknet
such as: Silk Road and Hydra.

2. The Network Surveillance:

Most of the technology companies are monitoring the internet traffic of their
customers while surfing the internet. Not only the Technology companies
but also many of the government agencies around the world under projects
which is considered mass surveillance over the society, the internet users
and even the data over the cell phones too.
First we will talk about How the network surveillance is done: Packets of
data are sent over the network which are moving from one node to another
along the path from its source until its assembled at its destination. During
this routing the companies put a computer program or may be a piece of

hardware that intercept the data movement or may be a hardware, These

are called Packet Capture or Packet Sniffing.
This Packet Capture is an application can intercept the data transferred
over the network and also log all the traffic. It also has the ability to capture
the packet, copy, decode its raw data and know its
content and after analyzing this data it saves
the information to a profile.
Edward Snowden is a computer security
professional, former CIA employee and former
government (NSA) contractor. On June, 6 2013,
Edward has leaked a very sensitive documents
to The Guardian and The Washington Post that
proves the existence of mass data collection
projects that were more far beyond what the
public knew. He characterized these projects
with Dangerous and Criminal activity,

One of these projects is known as PRISM which is

a secret surveillance program under the supervision of the National Security
Agency (NSA) which collects the data traffic of the users from at least nine
major internet company in the USA. With the help of more other technology
companies that participate in this project such: Microsoft in 2007, Yahoo!
in 2008, Facebook in 2009, Paltalk in 2009, Google in 2009, YouTube in
2010, Skype in 2011, AOL in 2011 and Apple in 2012. The documents
leaked by Edward indicate that 98% of the PRISM production is based on
Yahoo, Microsoft and Google.
After the revealing of this important documents by Edward the public has
made a wide range of outcry over these technology companies that helped
the NSA in its spying project which led to a great lose for these companies.
The loss is estimated in the cloud-based computing systems up to 35
million dollars in the next three years especially: Google, Cisco and AT&T.
In an interview with The Guardian, Snowden said:
I dont want to live in a society that does these sort of things

PRISM Overview
PRISM was just an example for one of the surveillance projects but there
are more other projects such as: MUSCULAR (DS-200B), DCSNet, XKeyscore, Stellar Wind ,.. etc.

The Advantages of the Network Surveillance:

1.It helped some countries to maintain its security and prevent some

crimes or any illegal activities in their countries.

2. Also most of the Social Media Websites such as Twitter, Facebook,
YouTube. etc. enable people to contact and communicate with
friends, family and get new friends everyday

The Disadvantages of the Network Surveillance:

1. If these data are leaked into the wrong hand it will threaten the life of
many people because of the very sensitive private details
2. Some of the journalists and whistleblowers uses the internet to
transfer very important document about corruption in some
companies so if their identities are known they will be in danger

Finally we can see that Surveillance is a double-edged weapon that may

be useful to protect the national security of the country but it may go
beyond this to threaten people life.

3. What is The Darknet?

The Dark net is a vast amount of Hidden Services or Websites which is
related to the criminal activities and all the illegal activities on the internet,
Its Content isnt indexed by the search engines and cant be accessible
direct by their addresses but they need special software such as Tor or
some configurations. Some of the users refer to the Tor Dark net with the
Onion Land.

What is the Content of the Darknet (Illegal Hidden Services)?

1. Black Markets: are markets to sell all
the illegal stuff such as: Drugs, Guns
and stolen stuff and so on, they have
made use of the anonymous tools to
build these markets such as Tor and Bitcoin, but the most interesting
about these black markets are about making reviews and ratings for
the items, the Most famous Black Market is (Silk Road).
2. Hacking Services: as Tor is hidding the identity of
the users, many hackers are using Tor for their
attacks so they cant be identified, and where they
offer their services.
One of the famous Hacking groups is (Anonymous).
3. Fraud: like the black market, Tor is used for fraud activity and selling
stolen credit cards and bank accounts, also many websites that works
for scams and counterfeiting.
4. Hitmen for Hire: some murders offer to kill people using Tor so they
can keep their identities safe on these websites of the Darknet, some
may refer to this as (Assassination Market) where people offer
money for the assassination of someone.
5. Illegal Pornography: some websites include contents of child
pornography under the legal age of 18, also revenge porn, sexualized
torture. Some of these sites is full of harmful malwares.
6. Terrorism: some groups uses Tor to commit crimes and kill innocence
peoples such as (ISIS Daesh), During the Onymous Operation one
of their websites has been seized and another one is hacked by the
Group (Anonymous) in November 2015 after the Paris
attacks.
7. Copyright Infragment: using some tools such as
BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer file sharing tools,
some users share copyrighted items such as books,
films, videos, and more other copyrighted items.
The Most famous file sharing sites (The Pirate Bay)

8. The Hidden Wikis: Its main page includes many links to many illegal
advertises such as drugs, guns, fraud, hiring murders, hacking services
but the most of them is child abuse advertises which raged many
Hacking groups such as: Anonymous and they said:
It does not matter who you are, if we find you to be
hosting, promoting, or supporting child pornography, you will
become a target
With the presence of anonymous tools such as Tor (for anonymous identity)
and Bitcoin (as an anonymous virtual currency), a black market becomes
no big deal where you can buy and sell without being tracked or known, but
we have to consider that Tor has its own legal usages to such as protecting
Journalists and activists who work to reveal the truth such as the news
shared by WikiLeaks, also for protecting users from surveillance and their
privacy from being monitored.
It isnt the fault of Tor that the criminals are using it for their illegal purposes,
The story begins when the agencies all over the world are gathering
information about every citizen in their countries and working on mass
surveillance projects to gain control over the people.
Now the criminals have the privacy and they became very powerful
Some Comments about the Darknet:
1. Criminals can already do bad things. Since they're willing to break
laws, they already have lots of options available that provide better
privacy than Tor provides....
2. Tor aims to provide protection for ordinary people who want to follow the
law. Only criminals have privacy right now, and we need to fix that....

6. The Internet, Deep Web and Darknet:

You must have heard about those terms and they seem to be confusing so
we are going to explain them in details:
1. The Internet: Its the ordinary part accessible by everyone and
indexed by the search engines such as: Facebook and Wikipedia and
other websites, it may be called the Ordinary or the Surface Web too.
2. The Deep Web: Its the part that cant be accessible by searching as it
isnt indexed by the search engines, and to access any site of it you
have to log on to it direct using its address such as: Academic
information and Bank databases, Its very large for the search engines
to cover, and Its larger than the internet too.
3. The Darknet: Its a subset of the Deep Web which mean that its
unindexed by the search engines too so you cant search for them
using Google or Bing or other search engines, but they differ from the
Deep Web as they need special configuration and authentication to
gain access to them, and they seem to be associated with criminal
activities such as: Hire-for-hit, Drugs, Fraud, Pornography and
Gambling, and so on.