Dark Web vs. Deep Web: What’s the Difference?

Dark web and Deep web – all technology enthusiasts have come across these terms without knowing their real meaning. It is there that stolen files, leaks of user bases, and illegal software are sold on the trading floors. Sometimes, even experts get confused with these concepts, and almost no one knows exactly when they appeared.

How Was the Dark Web Created? 

The birth of this concept occurred long before the advent of the Internet, which we use every day. 

In the 1970s, the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was building the ARPANet, which became the progenitor of today’s Internet. The primary goal of ARPANet was to bring together a network of research and military institutions in the United States, to increase the speed and improve the convenience of information exchange between them.

The onion routing source code was released under a free license, and the project was named The Onion Routing (Tor) in the early 2000s. In 2006, the non-profit organization Tor Project was created in the United States to develop the Tor network, and already in 2008, the Tor browser appeared – the most popular tool for entering the dark web.

What Is the Difference Between the Dark Net and Deep Web? 

The deep web contains webmail, online banking, social media pages and profiles, web forums, and everything else that belongs to a specific person. Resources that require paid access are also not indexed, which means they are part of the deep web content. To gain access to such content, certain data are needed, ranging from simple passwords to fingerprints. 

Websites that Google (or any other) search robot cannot reach are the structure of the largest part of the Internet – the Deep Net. To close the page of your site from indexing, you need to configure the robots.txt file. After these steps, the page will not appear in search results. 

The dark web is the part of the Internet where anonymous websites can be found. Their content is not subject to censorship, rules, and even the law. For this reason, the inhabitants of the darknet can be both journalists and other public figures who want to use the right to freedom of speech and criminals. You will need the Tor browser and dark web links to view these websites.

Many countries have declared the darknet illegal. And not in vain. Criminals actively use this network to sell not the most legal things. At the same time, they accept cryptocurrency as payment, which is quite difficult to track.

According to some reports, more than 60% of the cost of developing Tor is still paid by US federal agencies, such as the Department of Defense, the State Department, and the National Science Foundation. There is nothing strange in this because the military and intelligence still use the secure communication channel that they once developed. And the more proxy servers are in the Tor network, the safer the entire network is as a whole.