Recent reports about the dark web are rather saying the dark web is shrinking nor it had quite a number of dark sites takedown. The addition to that list is that users inside dark web can’t remain anonymous anymore. Yes, you heard it right!!! No more anonymity and everything about you can be unmasked just like that.
Now criminals, as well as dark web users, may need to upgrade their security using a VPN Since there are a high number of potentially privacy-busting connections between dark web and regular ‘surface’ web.
Iskander Sanchez-Rola who led the investigation into the Tor network at the university of Deusto, Spain made some interesting findings reported, “The dark web is maybe not as dark as it seems”.
The Research team found around 1.5 million links and more than 20 percent of the analyzed links contained pictures, documents, and java scripts were from the surface web.
The found Tracking Scripts that were specially designed to analyze users browsing behavior and more than 27% of the hidden pages had them.
One-third of these came from surface web and 43% are from Google.
How to avoid trackers on Dark Web!!
Sanchez-Rola this is a bigger problem because if the site on the dark web uses the same script as on the surface web then anyone can track the user’s activities and breach of identity can be more on lesser secure sites.
His report added,”Tor proxies – services on the surface web that act as gateways to the dark web, like the popular Tor2Web – are most at risk”.
These Tor2Web services can already see the IP address of the users which means any third party can access their information.If a user or criminal opens the dark website using the feature that is available in surface web via proxy then the browser fetches their resources in a normal bypassing the anonymisation network.
He strongly suggests using the Tor network for better privacy protection and along with a VPN o increase security. Finally, enable script blocking so that these causes the site to malfunction.
‘This research has demonstrated for the first time how much of the dark web is intrinsically linked to the surface or clear web,’ security researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis told in the report.