What is the Dark Web?

The Dark Web can be described as a corner of the World Wide Web that can only be accessed with anonymous technologies.
Such as special clients for proxy servers with encryption.
The Dark Web is made of web pages that cant be accessed from a normal web browser.
It is required a Tor, Freenet or I2P client to access it.
It is often confused with the Deep Web.

The Deep Web is part of the World Wide Web but cant be searched Duck Duck Go or Google
because the web pages are too old or without links.
Market places exist on the Dark Web.

Old websites could be fan pages of Independence day movie back from 1996 made on Angelfire is on the Deep Web.

So not to confuse Dark Web and Deep Web.
Sometimes Dark Web can be considered part of the Dark Web since it cant be searched by search engines.

There have been known to be illegal drug websites on the Dark Web such as the Silk Road.
Script Kiddies can buy malware scripts on the Dark Web for Cyber attacks.

Journalists are also known to use the Tor network and Dark Web to share information anonymously which can be dangerous.

The NSA Leaks Vault 7 on WikiLeaks speak to that.

What is Tor?

The way to connect to the Dark Web is via TO the Onion Router Network.
It is one of the backbones of the Dark Web.
A user simple installs a Tor client which is available for most operating systems and smart phones.

Development of Tor started way back in 1995.
It is very simple to connect to Tor via a free Tor Browser.
Tor protects against traffic being sniffed by Internet Providers.

It is very difficult for third party to figure out which Onion routed Internet servers are sending data
to your client machine.

Tor was originally made by the Naval Research Lab.

Another misconception is Tor is not spelled TOR but only capital T.

URLs on the Tor network use the .onion top level domain.
When using the Tor network a client acquires a list of available Tor nodes from a directory server.
When the user is trying to access a Tor URL a random path is taken via available Tor nodes and proxy servers.

The traffics entrance to the Tor network goes through an entry node.
The traffic is routed few random proxy servers.
And gets to the web server via an exit node.
Traffic coming to the entry node and existing at the exit node is in plain text.
Where all the traffic inside is encrypted.
Tor is not just used for web but also media, Internet services IRC chat and email.
Tor is volunteer operated.

The downside of Tor is it is overly slow if you visit traditional websites out of the Tor network.

When using a Tor browser it is recommended not to install any plugins since they can reveal sensitive information such as the IP address.

.onion URLs are known to change often.
A popular search engine is https://ahmia.fi/ or http://www.torchtorsearch.com

There is a lot of websites that do not do anything illegal on Tor but simple value privacy.