After a 16-month trial, unprecedented in the history of the global judicial system, Ross William Ulbricht was found guilty of seven charges, including money laundering and drug trafficking. It all started on the Deep Web.
Ross William Ulbricht, also known as “Dread Pirate Roberts,” is the founder of the online drug marketplace Silk Road, famous for drug dealing and anything criminal. He faces a potential life sentence for deals made in a space we all share and usually take for granted: cyberspace.
Most people heard about the Deep Webwhen Ulbricht was arrested and details about how big the Silk Road site was were released. It is now well known that the Deep Web is a source of content that is not visible to those who are not in the know.
Our daily online habits take place on the surface of the web, and include browsing websites whose content is indexed by crawlers that search and collect data. On the surface web, search results display social networking sites, games, and more.
It is believed that the surface web is estimated to be only 0.03% of the total Internet content crawled by search engines.
Trend Micro researchers defined the term “Deep Web” as “a category of content on the internet that, for various technical reasons, is not indexed by search engines.”
To put it simply, content hosted on the Deep Web is hidden, hard to find, and anonymous. Recently, the movie Blackhat showcased some of the defining features of the Deep Web, such as the Onion Router (TOR) that hackers (and others) use to hide their location.
Note, however, that many people mistakenly equate the Deep Web to refer only to The Onion Router (TOR) network. This is highly inaccurate since TOR is only one of three darknet networks that offer anonymity. The other two are I2P and Freenet.
The DeepWeb is also filled with websites and content hosted on alternative top-level domains or “rogue TLDs” that are not visible to most of us.
The Deep Web Timeline
The chart below shows the important events of the Deep Web:
