Recent research has shown that on the anonymous browsing network Tor, pages displaying images of child sexual abuse receive the most traffic
The six-month study sought to map hidden services on the so-called "dark web" and find out which ones were the most popular. The result was to uncover many websites selling illegal substances, but mainly child pornography. Unfortunately, the research revealed that it is extremely difficult to track down the people behind these sites.
Tor (The Onion Router) is an anonymous browsing network that allows people to access the internet without revealing their tracks, which encourages all kinds of illegal activity.
According to Dr. Gareth Owen from the University of Portsmouth and his colleagues, Tor traffic constitutes an average of 1.5% of overall daily internet traffic, while around 80,000 banned sites have been discovered within it.
"We only managed to visit most of the banned services once, as they don't have a long lifespan," Owen said during the unveiling of his research at the 31st Haus Communication Conference in Hanover.
The investigation also showed that most of the hidden services involved the sale of illegal substances, while black market pages, email services and those dealing with the virtual currency Bitcoin were also found.
Regarding child abuse, Owen argued that despite the fact that Tor doesn't have many specific images, users who visit them are led to others of the same content. It's no wonder that the traffic rate to such websites is 75%!
"We can't know what percentage is human and what percentage is machine. We just can't know," he said
Roger Dingdelaine, one of the creators of Tor, pointed out that the methodology of this research is more suitable for networks that include long-lived websites. Therefore, it proved difficult to record the history of visitors' movements on Tor.
"Without knowing how many websites were searched for and then disappeared, it is impossible to know the percentage of violent."
"There are important uses for secret services, such as when human rights activists use it to gain access to Facebook or anonymous blogs. The uses for secret services are new and have great potential," he concluded.
Source: skai.gr
