All about Darknet

[Carder]

The darknet is an anonymous and uncontrolled part of the Internet that is inaccessible to ordinary search engines like Google. It operates in a decentralized manner, and is accessed through special browsers such as Tor, which route encrypted messages through multiple servers to mask the user's location. This allows users to maintain almost complete anonymity.

Once investigators detect drug-related activity in the real world, they will be interested in what is being done online.

1) Getting data from open websites

Drug dealers use their deep-cover websites only as stores, searching for customers in public networks. It makes dealers are a lot more vulnerable. By law, owners of publicly accessible websites must pass on any information of interest to the police. For example, five users of the Reddit forum who discussed buying and selling prohibited goods on r / darknetmarkets were detained after the Reddit administration gave out their contact details. And the same Ulbricht left his email address somewhere.

2) interception of mail items

Law enforcement agencies work with delivery companies and post offices. Police can take the number of a suspicious item to track down the recipient.

3) Big data and machine learning

Using large amounts of data, police identify connections that would not otherwise be possible. They take into account IP addresses and online information, draw conclusions and gradually train artificial intelligence on them. This is an expensive and complex system, but its use pays off.

4) following the flow of money

Although the bitcoin cryptocurrency has a high degree of anonymity, the weak point is the purchase or sale of digital currency. The police can request data from bitcoin exchanges, who and when made transactions with the cryptocurrency. Law enforcement officers also cooperate with banks for this purpose.

5) Working undercover

Often, police agents gain confidence in the administrators of banned sites, as well as pose as sellers, retail and wholesale buyers.

6) Hacking

Modified software commissioned by the police or the FBI is widely used to identify users of the Deep Web. For example, this is exactly how a large illegal forum was opened - FBI employees introduced a vulnerability in it that forwarded users ' IP addresses "where necessary".

Attackers from the Deep Web remain unpunished only as long as law enforcement agencies do not begin to take countermeasures, which are often based not on the latest machine learning technologies, but on classical investigative methods.

A story about a darknet drug dealer.​

In 2019, a California court sentenced a 23-year-old Sacramento resident named Jose Robert Porras III to prison. He sold drugs (marijuana, methamphetamine and xanax) on the darknet, hiding behind the nickname Canna_Bars. Despite all attempts to remain anonymous, Porras was caught.

Federal agents were greatly helped by one mistake of Jose: he sent potential buyers a photo of marijuana lying on his palm. One picture was so clear that law enforcement agencies were able to recreate a fingerprint based on it and identify the seller. This helped to prove his guilt.

Porras started selling drugs on the darknet in 2017. He operated under the nickname The Fast Plug on the Wall Street Market site and Canna_Bars on the Dream Market site. During the trial, Jose admitted that during a year of activity on the darknet, he sold more than 53 kilograms of marijuana under one of the profiles.

"When we close stores, criminals simply move to other sites. Therefore, we decided to focus on specific sellers, " said the special agent of the us customs police, who led the operation. The darknet is based on a network of criminals who trust each other. There are tools and technologies that law enforcement agencies use to analyze the blockchain chain. One of the main advantages of blockchain is its transparency. Everyone can see everything.

Undercover agents portrayed money laundering specialists on the darknet, offering to exchange sellers ' bitcoins for real money. The operation led to the arrest of more than 40 people, the confiscation of drugs and $ 30 million in cryptocurrency. Federal agents also found $ 3.6 million in cash and gold bullion.

At one point, Porras ' financial operations, along with dozens of other people, were quietly taken over by Federal agents. In March 2018, Mann reviewed data on the activity of Canna_Bars on the Hansa Market, obtained from the Netherlands. The special agent found a link to the Imgur photo hosting: there was a whole album with high-quality photos of marijuana. Porras showed pictures to potential buyers to showcase the product.

The agent sent the photo to the forensic science lab. They took a photo and based on it recreated a fingerprint that matched the database-Porras was previously detained for another crime.

By linking the darknet user to a real person, Federal agents set up surveillance and made several control purchases of marijuana. The surveillance followed the same pattern: the police bought drugs through a platform on the network, then watched Porras and an accomplice take marijuana from the warehouse and throw it in the mailbox, and then the Postal service employees seized the goods.

After the sale, Canna_Bars laundered money, not knowing that he was doing it through an undercover agent. Customs police sent him several bundles of cash in Sacramento, after which the drug dealer was detained. Nine weapons (including an Uzi, a Smith and Wesson revolver, and an AK-47), 13 kilograms of marijuana, 100 xanax pills, and $ 10,000 were seized from Porras and his accomplice, Pasia Wu.

At the trial, Porras confessed to illegal possession of weapons and distribution of drugs. In December 2019, he was sentenced to 5 years and 10 months in prison.[/IMG]

 

[Carding 4 Carders]

Darknet, Dark Web, Deep Web, Surface Web – different parts of the world wide web
Darknet, Dark web, Deep web, and Surface web-all tech enthusiasts have come across these terms without knowing its real meaning.
Sometimes even experts get confused with these concepts.
We hope this post will shed some light on this issue and help you understand these often confusing terms.

So what is the difference between Darknet, Dark Web, Deep web and Surface Web?
In short, we can say that they are all different parts of the world wide web (WWW), where websites have different access rights.
And the Darknet is the darker side of the web, while the Surface web is the lighter side.
Did you know that only about 4% of the Internet is accessible through search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo, and the remaining 96% of Internet content is only accessible through special tools and software-browsers and another Protocol beyond direct links or credentials.
So guess how vast is the darker side of the world wide web, where online criminals, military secrets, hacker profiles, black markets like Silk Road, drugs, hitmen, etc. hide.
So, let's start working from the darker side to the lighter side, OK?

Darknet and Dark Web:
Darknet is an overlay network-a network built on top of the Internet that was designed specifically for anonymity.
Darknet tools are designed to hide your identity or presence.
Two typical varieties of the darknet are friend-to-friend networks and privacy networks such as Tor, I2P, Freenet, DN42, etc.
Now you may be confused – why did I put "Darknet and Dark Web" as the title?
In fact, the darknet and the dark web are connected to each other.
As we have already mentioned, the darknet is a network built through Internet technologies, whereas the term dark web refers to websites on the darknet.
Darknet – these are pages on servers that cannot be accessed by a search engine (or, in fact, a user) without a corresponding account.
Large-scale illegal activity is taking place on the darknet.
Now you have another question: how can we access the darknet or darkweb?
Since it is limited to regular browsers, we need special tools to access the darker side of the Internet.
And the best – known and most used of them is Tor, as a shortened name for the Onion Router, which routes traffic to darkweb websites through certain encryption tools to ensure anonymity.
Tor encrypts data, including the target site, several times and sends it through a scheme of randomly selected tor network relays.
Each relay decrypts the encryption level to show only the next relay, in order to transmit the remaining encrypted data in the future.
The final tor relay decrypts the innermost layer of encryption and sends the source data to the destination without revealing or even knowing the source address-quite complex, correct !!!
Just remember that we use TOR to access the dark web.
Websites in the dark web sometimes crash, due to the reputation of the dark side.
But if you want good customer service, avoid the dark.

Deep Web:
Now moving forward – there is a deep web above the dark band.
Dwebweb is also on the darker side of the Internet, because web content cannot be found or directly accessed through web search engines such as Google or Bing.
As we have already mentioned, 96% of online content is found on deepweband on the darknet.
Theiwebd includes many very common services, such as webmail and online banking, as well as paid advertising services, such as video on demand, and much more.
Very little illegal activity also occurs in deepweb.
Unlike the darknet, deepweb does not require TOR or other special browsers.
Instead, you need a direct link to access or sites specifically designed to search for these purposes.

Surface web or websites:
The Surface web-also called the Visible Web, Indexed Web, Indexable Web, or Lightnet – is that part of the world wide web that is easily accessible to the General public and searchable with standard web search engines.
This is the opposite of dipweb.

Total difference between Darknet, Dark Web, Deep Web and Surface Web:

Darknet | Darkweb | Deepweb | website
Darknet/Dark Web	Restricted for special browsers They are not indexed for search engines Large-scale illegal activity Immeasurable by nature
Deep Web	Available via password, encryption, or gateway software Not indexed for search engines Small illegal activity outside the darknet Huge in size and growing exponentially
Surface Web	Available Indexed for search engines Minor illegal activity Relatively small size

 

[Carding]

The biggest detentions on the DARKNET network​

Arrests in Alpha

By the time AlphaBay was exposed in July 2017, The platform had 400,000 users with a daily transaction volume of up to $ 1 million.

Alexander KAZ, the alleged founder of the site, was arrested in Thailand and had to be extradited to the United States before committing suicide at the drug enforcement Bureau's headquarters in Thailand.

According to the confiscation complaint filed in Eastern California District court:

"AlphaBay only allowed its users to make transactions in digital currencies such as Bitcoin, Monero, and Ethereum, but BTC was the most preferred digital currency."

Authorities seized 1,605. 05 Bitcoin, 8,309. 28 Ethereum, 3,692 ZCash and several Monero coins.

Secret operation in America

On June 26, 2018, the US Department of justice announced the arrest of 35 darknet vendors in an operation involving at least five Federal agencies.

As a result, the Agency confiscated significant amounts of drugs, firearms and assets worth millions.

Among the valuables seized were $3 million worth of cash and gold bars; thousands of BTC and other cryptocurrencies worth more than $22 million; and a huge amount of bitcoin mining equipment.

PrioratSiona

Exposing the silk road

It was the first modern marketplace on the darknet and a haven for any illegal goods and services, including drugs and weapons.

The arrest of the founder of Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, was made on October 2, 2013. Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The volumes of crypto seized during the silk road debacle were staggering.

Initially, the FBI managed to seize about 26,000 BTC, but by the end of October, this figure reached 144,000 BTC. According to today's cryptocurrency estimate, this amount is $ 5 billion.

RAID on Hansa Market operators

Shortly after the arrest of AlphaBay, the Hansa Market operators were seized, followed by the closure of the platform.

Hansa, which is not as big as AlphaBay in terms of traffic or revenue for the darknet market, received a rapid influx of new users after The latter's sudden closure. In fact, Hansa Market was created as a receiver of AlphaBay in the elusive online drug trade.

However, the Dutch police had other plans - to trace the site's servers to a hosting company in Lithuania.

After German law enforcement agencies seized two grp site administrators in June 2017, Dutch police officers began to act, taking full control of the Hansa backend.

For almost a month, they continued to monitor the activities of buyers and sellers, thus collecting additional evidence and information.

During the operation, more than 1,200 BTC were seized , not to mention the consequences of interaction between sellers and buyers with the platform, whose data was transferred to investigative authorities across the EU.

This article is presented for informational purposes only and does not carry a call to action.

 

[PrivatnO]

Does anyone know alternative to dream market?

 

[Jollier]

Darknet moved to Telegram

Today I will tell you how the darknet smoothly moved from its place of residence, and there is a little more than nothing left in the onion network.
The main characteristic phenomenon for the darknet today is its real death and now there are no objectively really large resources, the exception is you know what. Hydra has absorbed everything that is possible, and any competitors, including Medusa, are not really competitors, since all the markets of the site itself are located on Hydra. How do we know that? Yes, and from the same place where the OMG affiliation comes from! for the XTC group, Cart ads are purchased from the same accounts as store ads. What kind of Hydra markets do Medusa own?

And that we have: one normal resource called Hydra, two sites for the sale of drugs, which is tens of thousands of times less than the great and terrible three-headed one, we throw a couple of forums on top, like Rutor and others, on which the flow of people is very small. So that you understand, advertising in the Telegram channel for up to 30,000 subscribers is guaranteed to cost more than posting on the main page of this forum. In short, there are literally no people on the Russian darknet outside the three-headed platform. Maybe ALEx is showing promise, but more on that later.

In fact, everything is quite prosaic. Why do you need a sophisticated TOR, creating sites there, and in addition, it is not known how to promote the whole thing, if there is one simple solution with a paper airplane on the logo-Telegram. There is literally everything here: from dealers in weapons and drugs to custom beatings. And Yes: ALEx buys ads right here in the Cart. Do you know why? Because there is already a ready-made infrastructure for the channels, there is literally everything to get promoted.
In General, the situation is quite ironic – "the darknet moved to Telegram". Of course, TOR still has some zest, but for the most part, all cases are now conducted exclusively in the messenger, and we are talking about crime of any nature. There are carders, scammers, and anyone else who can earn money illegally - because it is convenient and, most importantly, anonymous. Maybe the messenger is not so secure, and it is possible to open it in some way, but more on this in the next article.
Thanks for attention. And don't waste any time – we'll see you very soon.

 

[Jollier]

Darknet: is the rabbit hole deep?​

CONDITIONALLY ANONYMOUS USERS
Modern criminals have long been conducting their business in anonymous darknet networks, where everything is available.
This is what the West is trying to do.
In early July, Europol managed to hack the anonymous organized crime communication service EncroChat.
So are encrypted networks really anonymous?
EncroChat only produced phones and positioned itself as a "law-abiding" company that is concerned about customer safety, preventing the leakage of user data.
Indeed, it was simply impossible to track a person using the gadgets of this company: the SIM card is not tied to the device in any way, there is no camera, microphone, GPS module or USB port. In CryptoPhone (as phones with reliable security features are now called), two operating systems were installed: from a harmless Android, you could always switch to the secret EncroChat channel. And when the device was physically removed, it was quickly and completely reset thanks to the "alarm" pin code.

Such a CryptoPhone cost 900 pounds sterling, and a six-month subscription to its service cost 1,350 pounds. However, it was almost impossible to buy the device without the necessary acquaintances and recommendations.
But in 2017, the French police still managed to introduce their own spyware into the perfect system, which allowed the security forces to" comb " the correspondence of users and collect unprecedented data on drug deals, arms trafficking and a host of other atrocities.
EncroChat users became suspicious only when they found that they could not reset the gadget. The company tried to correct the situation: it released an update, but the software of the special services did not lag behind, and at one of the stages the SIM card provider was under the control of the security forces. When EncroChat warned customers about hacking and data leaks, it was too late arrests had already begun (it is characteristic that among the thousands of detainees there were many police officers and officials).

For some time, the EncroChat hack deprived criminals of an anonymous method of communication and threw the criminal world into confusion-which devices should be trusted now? Demand immediately generated supply, and immediately after the scandalous operation, Omerta appeared on the market, which began to actively offer such services to "victims": "You narrowly avoided a fiasco? Celebrate with a 10% discount. Join the Omerta family and communicate with impunity!»
(It is worth noting that the word "Omerta" comes from the lexicon of the Sicilian mafia and means "vow of silence", or "mutual responsibility" none of the Mafiosi who observe "omerta" will under any circumstances hand over their accomplices to the servants of the law, for violation-death).
So-called "crypto-phone companies" often do not have public executives. After all, they are aware that their devices are interesting to criminals (if they are not already such). For example, the company MRK a competitor to Encrochat - was created by two Scottish drug lords and earned millions on sales of "absolutely impenetrable smartphone". The company was shut down only after the police discovered its involvement in the murder of a well-known Irish blogger.
And among the clients of another canadian company, Phantom Secure, were members of the Sinaloa drug cartel, who used encrypted communication to deliver goods from Mexico to the United States. Initially, its owner was not going to sell smartphones to bandits, counting on the legal use of the devices, but quickly gained a clientele from the criminal world.

Encrypthat was particularly popular among European criminals. Although at first the Dutch system was designed for celebrities who were afraid of personal data leakage. But, as in the case of Phantom Secure, it quickly turned into a mafia-like social network.
The French special services were helped to infiltrate criminals by a legal mechanism that, since 2016, allows them to listen in on phone conversations and collect Internet data on citizens without court approval. This law" on collecting information " was adopted in France after the sensational shooting of the editorial office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo (despite protests and heated debates about the inviolability of personal information of citizens).
Interestingly, there is still no international definition of "cybercrime". Mainly because of the different policies of countries on this issue. There are international organizations, such as the UN Office on drugs and crime or Interpol, with their own specialists in the field of cybersecurity.
And in South-East Asia, we actively worked in the field of digital forensics. In Laos, the police had no means at all of collecting evidence from phones and computers (and no knowledge of how to measure their actions against the nature of suspicions). With the support of Norway, the United States, Japan, and Australia, we helped set up a crime lab there. Now Laos can investigate crimes related to the use of digital technologies.

HOW TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS HAS CHANGED ORGANIZED CRIME
Sergey, a cybersecurity specialist who helps me work on this material (such specialists are paranoid to the extent that experienced conspiracy theorists never dreamed of, so we will call him by this name), believes that any ciphers that are used in secret messengers in the service of the government can be decrypted over time. Even quantum communication, slowly seeping into the masses from government offices and scientific laboratories, which allegedly cannot be intercepted due to instant data transmission. Not yet possible. The keyword is "for now".
In the modern world, the confrontation from the plane of "state - dissidents" has been transferred to the technological "hackers against hackers" (hackers working for the government against anti-globalist hackers, or fraud hackers against police hackers-there are a lot of options).
By the way, 91% of cyber attacks start with e-mail, which is not protected "like an open front door" for most people, and with social networks. And the people who launched rockets and ran the country do not care about this. Most recently, Twitter reported a coordinated hacker attack and admitted that fraudsters had gained access to internal microblogging system management tools.
In this new hacking reality, IT executives around the world are increasingly worried about the data of the companies entrusted to them, fearing that one day they will find it freely available or sold on the Internet. According to a survey by the German sociological center of 1,250 specialists in this field, last year 70% of it specialists were afraid of this.

In the sphere of "non-progressive" organized crime, technological progress has also made enormous changes. With consequences that can't be stopped.
Last year, Mike Power, a British journalist and author of Drugs 2.0, explored the phenomenon of how the Internet has revolutionized the global drug market. The journalist says that now the ecstasy pill has become cheaper than a pint of beer. And he concludes that drugs have won a convincing victory in the state's war on drugs. Mostly thanks to technological progress, the ingenuity of chemists and continuous round-the-clock anonymous communication.
Power cites police statistics, according to which over the past year, almost 4% of the population of England and Wales (that is, 1 million 250 thousand people) - used class a drugs.
The availability and cheapness of" substances " has led to an unprecedented rise in consumption, and poly-drug addiction has become the new norm around the world.

The United Nations office on drugs and crime cites the following data: in modern society, about 275 million people on the planet use drugs at least once a year.
And it seems that this figure is somewhat underestimated.
If we talk about drug users in Russia, various agencies in recent years have called the figure from five to eight million people.
Today it is easy to become not only a consumer, but also a dealer. After all, you can also communicate with wholesale suppliers via encrypted messengers such as Wickr, WhatsApp or Signal. The drug market turned out to be flexible: the groups controlling it easily change, adapting to new realities.
At the same time, by 2020, the global community is faced with a dilemma: technologies that have evolved to protect the privacy of millions of people also protect the privacy of criminals.

ZAPARANOIL ITSELF-ZAPARANOY ANOTHER
In August 1988, electronic engineer Tim may (spiritual brother of Timothy Leary and Noam Chomsky) distributed the "cryptanarchist Manifesto", which included these lines:"very soon, Network interaction will be impossible to track due to repeated changes in the routes of encrypted packets and blocks, giving cryptographic protocols almost perfect protection [...] Cryptanarchy will allow free trade in national secrets, as well as illegal drugs and stolen goods."
We will not make an excursion into the history of cipherpunk, but three years after this Manifesto, programmer Philip Zimmerman came up with the first PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption package. It was enthusiastically received by crypto-anarchists, but then it was never really in demand (it didn't go any further than online casinos and the black market of information).
But another invention, developed a little later in the laboratories of the US Navy and known today as TOR, had a very successful future. Allowing multiple encryption and data transfer, THE tor router (an abbreviation for the Onion Router) was nicknamed "bulbous" for the principle of its organization numerous, superimposed shells through which encrypted traffic passes.
Governments disliked this onion router (especially with the birth of bitcoin in 2010 and the emergence of online stores, where thanks to anonymous crypto payments, you could buy everything from a passport of any state to a person).
At one point, independent foundations quietly ceded funding for the TOR project to various government departments, which now collectively provide about 80% of ITS budget.

Yasha Levin, an American journalist of Russian origin, in his recently published book "the Internet as a weapon" consistently proves that the Internet is not an alternative space to the state (not a world without power), but a weapon of the special services, which it remains to this day.
His disturbing account of how techno-utopia is now turning into a real anti-utopia, he begins with the Cold war and the first computers connected in the bowels of the ARPA military organization in a single network. Delves into the events of the Vietnam war and the history of spying on the internal enemy (participants in student marches, "Black Panthers", feminists and other suspicious elements that filled America in the late 60s).
But now Google has appeared in its history, which has risen on the system of total collection and processing of data about all users of its services. The technology developed to sell contextual advertising was remarkably similar to government surveillance techniques. Here, the logic of the market and the logic of state control coincide and combine.
Levin builds the final chapters of his book around the revelations of Snowden, Assange, and Applebaum, all of which serve as a screen for an ever-growing Alliance of intelligence agencies and corporations.

The journalist's discovery is that the work on creating a "free Internet" is funded by special services, the imitation of freedom on the darknet (including the sale of child porn) works as an ideal cover, Wikileaks was a deliberate handout of the Pentagon to journalists, and TOR and similar anonymizers are in fact easily permeable to the state and are generated by it. Illusory protection from surveillance creates conditions for much deeper and closer surveillance.
It sounds quite paranoid. But in the ideology of the "free Internet", General paranoia is directly exploited by the state as a distraction from real activities.
Against this scenario, the end-to-end encryption debate that began in 2019 seems like a farce.

FREEDOM VS SECURITY
Today, we are facing a huge battleground between governments and technology companies. The core of the debate is that governments are attacking technology companies to stop providing criminals with a "safe place" to communicate, while companies say they are protecting the privacy of their users. After Apple and WhatsApp, Facebook is the last platform to continue public dialogue with the state.
In an open letter addressed to Mark Zuckerberg, the governments of the United States, great Britain and Australia asked the social media giant not to introduce end-to-end encryption, or at least to develop a backdoor in their encryption protocols for special services to access user content. US attorney General William Barr personally referred to the fact that Facebook's information technologies do not allow the authorities to investigate crimes that are often discussed in instant messengers on the eve of their Commission.
Backdoor encryption (English - "back door") this is the name of a mathematical feature of encryption key exchange that is able to decrypt end-to-end encryption. If necessary, the court wants to use backdoor to transmit the decrypted information to the government.
Here, it is probably worth saying a few words about what encryption is.

Here is an example of encrypted text. Here is the plain text:
"this is a Facebook post."
And here is its encrypted version:
eXP3jH + 7giCt1gIg0zHm3j3DPI1xuFRvbhmaKJx / uQQ =
If you don't have a private key to decrypt, you can hardly understand what is written here. Please note that all modern messengers, including Facebook Messenger, are already encrypted. But with "normal" encryption, which is controlled by the platform that provides the services. That is, if necessary, Facebook has access to the decrypted message. The introduction of end-to-end encryption will mean that even Facebook itself will be left without access to this information.
On the one hand, this contradicts Facebook's business model, which is built on data monetization. On the other hand, by implementing end — to-end encryption, the company is moving away from pressure from law enforcement agencies, court orders, warrants, and disputes.
Facebook currently uses artificial intelligence (AI) and a team of moderators to monitor its content and posts.

They report any suspicious activity in messages to the authorities. Such a moderation system is costly for Facebook and often becomes a source of negative media coverage or lawsuits. In the presence of end-to-end encryption, all these problems disappear in the absence of access to content, an FB employee simply throws up his hands: they say, he would have helped, but now there is no way.
So, an important argument of the government is "a server that encrypts data makes it difficult to catch bad guys." But this raises the question of the reality of these intentions: does the government care about hidden crimes or is it worried about the missed opportunities for easy surveillance of the right people?
There is no universal solution to how to make sure that new technologies do not undermine freedom of speech and do not violate human rights to privacy. And the private one, by and large, is no longer there.

Here we recall the motto of the women's liberation movement in America in the 1970s-Personal is political ("Personal is political"). Then he appeared in order to tear down the walls of the private sphere, behind which women are beaten and killed. Well, good slogans last a long time and, from time to time, are revived in a new quality. The modern user is stuck at the crossroads between the Internet of information and the Internet of values. And in the future, the battle of States with corporations is likely to finally sweep away the privacy of a small user.

Legal restrictions imposed by a number of States and espionage passions around Snowden and similar characters (who likes surveillance?) pushed the ordinary user to dive into the deep hole of the Darknet. The user did not like the idea that someone decides for an adult what and where they should see or not see on the network. Realizing this, the user started looking for ways to circumvent censorship and blocking, and very soon found a universal solution in the form of special browsers or browser plugins for anonymous networks. Well, in the dark, "all cats are black".
To understand what kind of freedom is hidden from prying eyes, and who benefits more from it-the user or the state, I decided to explore the Russian-speaking part of the Darknet with all its criminal components…

 

[Mutt]

Search engines.
Tor Browser greets us with the built-in search engine DuckDuckGo. In terms of privacy, this is an excellent choice, but looking for DDG exclusively on the open Internet, so it will not come in handy in our research.

However, there are almost more search engines on the darknet than on the clearnet. Among the most popular are Ahmia, Candle and Torch. There were also good search engines called Grams and Fess, but for unknown reasons they are not available now. Each of them produces different results for the same queries, so it's best to have all three resources in your bookmarks.

The first one I usually use is Candle - this is not the most famous search engine, but it does not have advertisements for third-party resources and the relevance of the results, according to my feelings, is higher than that of the same Torch. On the other hand, even irrelevant links are sometimes interesting.

Torch, as its name suggests, continually provides links to drug-related resources. He also does not understand the Cyrillic alphabet at all and managed to ruin his reputation by advertising the most dubious sites.

The Ahmia search engine is different in that it is available both on the darknet and on the clearnet. At the same time, the relevance of the search results is (subjectively) not very high: like Torch, it often gives out links that are in no way related to the search topic.

However, if we decided to study the mysterious world of the darknet, then search engines will be of little help here - too few resources are available for indexing. Sometimes a search engine can even lead to the wrong place, giving a link to a fake project.

Directories are Tor maps.
I recommend starting your research with reference directories. There, too, of course, you will find garbage and outdated links, but there is not much choice. The most famous resource in English is The Hidden Wiki, in Russian - "Godnotaba". In addition, there are more than a dozen collections of links - see, for example, OnionDir and Oneirun.

Darknet educational
Rampant piracy and cheap book readers made buying books unnecessary for many. But copyright holders are unlikely to accept this. Therefore, there are fewer and fewer links to download books in the clearnet. On the darknet, it's a different matter: there are "Flibusta" and "Verbal Hero" to choose from. The choice there is so huge that it seems as if there is everything at all.

The Darknet is a friend of torrents.
Back in the early to mid-2000s, no one thought to prohibit torrents. People downloaded books, films, games, TV series and even textbooks and sometimes did not even think that they were breaking the law. This situation is gradually changing, but the darknet is becoming a new refuge for piracy.

Torrent trackers and search engines like RuTor and The Pirate Bay necessarily have links in onion that allow users to ignore bans and restrictions.

Online stores that do not accept cards.
Let's move on to illegal shops, for which the “onion” network is famous. Tellingly, most of them are related to drug trafficking, but you cannot erase the words from the song, you will have to walk through them. Buying drugs on the Internet is now an ordinary thing: every old woman from a bench in the yard already knows what kind of treasures suspicious young people are looking for.

If you suddenly have not heard about these dark deeds, then I will explain in a nutshell. The buyer first uses the exchanger to receive bitcoins, then goes to the store with them and purchases the desired substances. He is given the address and a photo of the bookmark, which he has to find.

Glossary of terms
Warehouse - a person who stores large volumes of drugs, sells them through master treasures - bookmarks with a large amount of substance for the treasure.
Cladman - takes the master treasure, packs the substance into smaller treasures.
Grover is a drug manufacturer. As a rule, production is arranged in garages, basements, abandoned factories and similar places.
Operator - a person in charge of communication between the store and the customer. The operator's task is to solve all the issues that have arisen, interacting with the audience. In other words, a project support.

The mastodons of the drug business in Russia are the Hydra and WayAway services. Of course there are other stores like Matanga or Darkcon. But beginners do not start to trust right away, and it is not easy to find out about them.

In the West, the most popular and largest stores are Dream Market and Free Market.

Ramp.
A year and a half ago, Ramp opened the list of the largest and most influential Russian stores on the darknet. It provided a forum for communication between customers and sellers. In the summer of 2017, Ramp stopped functioning, which puzzled many former users. The closure of Ramp was widely discussed in other forums, and someone even tried to conduct a journalistic investigation.

Eventually, someone who identified himself as a former Ramp moderator opened Ramp 2.0. However, it quickly turned out that it was a scam: having collected deposits from sellers and buyers, Ramp 2.0 disappeared after its predecessor. By the way, it was quite possible to guess that this would happen: the moderator under the nickname Existence lost his PGP key long before the RAMP fell, and nosy scammers were able to get it and later began to impersonate Existence.

Ironically, Existentia was in charge of the site's safety.

Hydra.
Ramp was quickly replaced by a forum called Hydra. So far, his administration is doing everything to maintain leadership. Not only does the site maintain its own Telegram channel, where it shares bookmarking methods and world news about drugs with subscribers, but more recently Hydra bought ads on YouTube, which caused serious public outrage. Hydra is calmly surviving DDoS attacks and so far remains confidently afloat.

Jobs where "headhunters" recruit "cladmen" - anonymous couriers, "warehouses", growers and operators. The latter vacancy is less common than treasure men, the demand for which is huge due to the frantic turnover of personnel.

Hacking forums.
For many, the dark web ends at drug sites, but this is just one of the first stops on our journey through the dark side of the internet. There are also sites on the darknet where a user will receive a lifetime ban for trying to hire a person in the drug business. Let's see what are the largest hacker and carder forums on the Russian darknet.

WWW.
Among the English-language forums, DaMaGeLaB.IN is notable - its users are engaged in research and discussion of hacking, coding, malware and other topics related to information security.