Britannica Explains In these videos, Britannica explains a variety of topics and answers frequently asked questions.In other words, people living in liberal democracies are more likely to exploit the dark web for malicious purposes, whereas users living under repressive regimes in non-democratic countries might be more likely to use Tor to circumvent local censorship restrictions and access free information on the internet. 'In countries coded as 'free', the percentage of users visiting Onion/Hidden Services as a proportion of total daily Tor use is nearly twice as much or ~7.8 percent.' 'The average rate of likely malicious use of Tor in our data for countries coded by Freedom House as 'not free' is just 4.8 percent,' the authors write in their paper. 'So even though the Tor anonymity network can be used for some highly malicious purposes, most people on an average day seem to use it more as a hyper-private version of Chrome or Firefox.'Įven more interestingly, the analysis showed that the use of Tor to access hidden services or regular web content differed between liberal democratic nations and countries with more repressive laws and rights. Part of the deep web, however, is the dark web, and parts of the dark web do host malicious content. The deep web, as it is known, is simply the parts of the internet that aren't indexed by regular search engines (as opposed to the surface web). There's nothing necessarily immoral or wrong about any of this, by the way. In the study, Jardine and his team analysed data from the Tor network, generally considered to be the largest and most popular network enabling anonymous, private access to the uncensored web, via use of special software that connects to a system of onion routers, designed to ensure the user's anonymity.

But the dark web is also a misunderstood place, and the connotations its name conjures up aren't representative of the vast majority of activity that takes place within its anonymous confines, according to new research.Ī new study led by cybersecurity researcher Eric Jardine from Virginia Tech suggests that only a small fraction of the dark web is being used to access hidden sites – and, in this case, the hidden activity isn't even necessarily illicit activity (although, given the dark web's shadowy corners, it could be).

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