The Dark Web: Understanding and Probing Its Depths

This course introduces the "Dark Web": content that exists on darknets and overlay networks that require specific tools access. This course helps you to understand who uses it, how it is accessed, and the security issues involved. The “Dark Web” is the world wide web content that exists on darknets, overlay networks that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access. This course delivers a clear understanding of what it is, how to navigate it and the challenges involved. The dark web forms a small part of the deep web, the part of the Web not indexed by web search engines, although sometimes the term deep web is mistakenly used to refer specifically to the dark web. The darknets which constitute the dark web include small, friend-to-friend peer-to-peer networks, as well as large, popular networks such as Tor, Freenet, I2P, and Riffle operated by public organizations and individuals. Users of the dark web refer to the regular web as Clearnet due to its unencrypted nature. The Tor dark web or onionland uses the traffic anonymization technique of onion routing under the network's top-level domain suffix .onion.