How do ‘dark web’ sites like Silk Road or Blue Sky operate if they are impossible to access? Is it by word of mouth? I’m not looking for specifics, just a general understanding of how this works.
They’re not impossible to access. If you have the right software, you can get access, and the software is not hard to obtain. In the case of the Silk Road, the software was invented by the US for the use of oppressed foreign people to be able to safely communicate. Word about these things spreads by word of mouth.
What is supposedly secret about them is that the cryptography prevents the authorities from being able to track the identity of individual posters to, for example, forums about drugs.
I said supposedly secret, because although they might not be accessible to law enforcement by computer tracing, the bottom line is, as is the case with many high security hacks, they are vulnerable to law enforcement using a species of social hacking - people give their identity information away accidentally or even necessarily, in order to do business. You must give a real world address to which you want drugs sent, for example. Thus, notwithstanding the high level of cryptography, the authorities were able to penetrate the Silk Road and shut it down.
People can be blinded by the promise of a dazzling strength of cryptography, and lose sight of the fact that if law enforcement floods the sites with fake sellers and buyers, they are unusable to those who want to do criminal business on them.
First off, there’s a bit of a nomenclature problem. Technically, the Dark Web is just the part of the Interent that is not indexed by search engines like Google. If you set up a little private webserver on a special port and let a few friends connect to it, that’s part of the Dark web.
However, more and more often, the term is used for sites that are hosted on a network that is atypical, particularly the Onion network. These are the sites that are only available with the right software.
The Onion network, while it cannot be easily crawled like websites can be, does have sites that are directories made by users that list the location of popular sites. They are usually made in Wiki format. As sites on the Dark Web very often change their address a lot, this is the only real way to find stuff. Sometimes you have to jump through multiple directories.
Word of mouth only needs to get you so far as the directories, not the actual websites hawking illegal content.
A simple Google search works just fine.
This reminds me of when I took a look at the SilkRoad aways back. A guy (probably a group) on the forums created, literally, thousands of bogus accounts. With these accounts he vouched for himself as a reputable drug dealer, only handling a few people at a time. But, as he had enough accounts he appeared legit and kept this up for close to a year. Then, he did a few last deals with real people and their Bitcoin and walked away. At the current exchange rate at that time, it was about $30k US.
Speaking of Bitcoin, I suspect that that had a lot to do with Silk Road’s fall, too. Bitcoin is perfectly secure… if everyone involved uses it perfectly. But if anyone anywhere uses it in any way less than perfectly, there’s a heck of a lot of publicly available information you can use to track it. And I’d be surprised if the number of Bitcoin users who maintain proper security techniques is as high as 10%.
Some are brands like Silk Road others are by invite only. So yes word of mouth is the way they spread, there are also active Reddit and 4Chan threads that discuss the sites, at this stage there is no google for tor.
Imagine that paper currency only worked if every holder kept track of the serial numbers of each and every bill they ever handled, and it puts the issue in perspective.
No, that’s the Deep Web, not the Dark Web.