Thoughts about the Dark Web

August 8, 2024

This essay is the work of a dumb humanoid. No smart software required.

The Dark Web. Wow. YouTube offers a number of tell-all videos about the Dark Web. Articles explain the topics one can find on certain Dark Web fora. What’s forgotten is that the number of users of the Dark Web has been chugging along, neither gaining tens of millions of users or losing tens of millions of users. Why? Here’s a traffic chart from the outfit that sort of governs The Onion Router:

Source: https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html

The chart is not the snappiest item on the sprawling Torproject.org Web site, but the message seems to be that TOR has been bouncing around two million users this year. Go back in time and the number has increased, but not much. Online statistics, particularly those associated with obfuscation software, are mushy. Let’s toss in another couple million users to account for alternative obfuscation services. What happens? We are not in the tens of millions.

Our research suggests that the stability of TOR usage is due to several factors:

The hard core bad actors comprise a small percentage of the TOR usage and probably do more outside of TOR than within it. In September 2024 I will be addressing this topic at a cyber fraud conference.
The number of entities indexing the “Dark Web” remains relatively stable. Sure, some companies drop out of this data harvesting but the big outfits remain and their software looks a lot like a user, particularly with some of the wonky verification Dark Web sites use to block automated collection of data.
Regular Internet users don’t pay much attention to TOR, including those with the one-click access browsers like Brave.
Human investigators are busy looking and interacting, but the numbers of these professionals also remains relatively stable.

To sum up, most people know little about the Dark Web. When these individuals figure out how to access a Web site advertising something exciting like stolen credit cards or other illegal products and services, they are unaware of a simple fact: An investigator from some country maybe operating like a bad actor to find a malefactor. By the way, the Dark Web is not as big as some cyber companies assert. The actual number of truly bad Dark Web sites is fewer than 100, based on what my researchers tell me.

A very “good” person approaches an individual who looks like a very tough dude. The very “good” person has a special job for the touch dude. Surprise! Thanks, MSFT Copilot. Good enough and you should know what certain professionals look like.

I read “Former Pediatrician Stephanie Russell Sentenced in Murder Plot.” The story is surprisingly not that unique. The reason I noted a female pediatrician’s involvement in the Dark Web is that she lives about three miles from my office. The story is that the good doctor visited the Dark Web and hired a hit man to terminate an individual. (Don’t doctors know how to terminate as part of their studies?)

The write up reports:

A Louisville judge sentenced former pediatrician Stephanie Russell to 12 years in prison Wednesday for attempting to hire a hitman to kill her ex-husband multiple times.

I love the somewhat illogical phrase “kill her ex-husband multiple times.”

Russell pleaded guilty April 22, 2024, to stalking her former spouse and trying to have him killed amid a protracted custody battle over their two children. By accepting responsibility and avoiding a trial, Russell would have expected a lighter prison sentence. However, she again tried to find a hitman, this time asking inmates to help with the search, prosecutors alleged in court documents asking for a heftier prison sentence.

One rumor circulating at the pub which is a popular lunch spot near the doctor’s former office is that she used the Dark Web and struck up an online conversation with one of the investigators monitoring such activity.

Net net: The Dark Web is indeed interesting.

Stephen E Arnold, August 8, 2024

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Dark Web, law enforcement, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.