INTHEBLACK October 2021 - Magazine - Page 48
F E AT U R E
// D A R K W E B E C O N O M Y
Centre: US Deputy
Attorney General Jeffrey
Rosen (C), FBI Director
Christopher Wray (L) and
Drug Enforcement
Agency acting
Administrator Timothy
Shea (R) attend a news
conference reporting the
arrest of 179 people and
the seizing of more than
US$6.5 million
(A$8.7 million) in a
worldwide crackdown
on opioid trafficking on
the dark web.
48 ITB October 2021
Payments on the dark web are made using
cryptocurrencies, and illegally obtained goods are
often delivered using gig worker delivery services,
which are harder to trace than the postal service.
Think of the entire internet ecosphere as an iceberg.
The “world wide web” that we are familiar with
comprises just the top 5 per cent of the iceberg – the
visible part. Beneath the water is the “deep web”,
which accounts for about 90 per cent of the world’s
websites. Below the deep web is the “dark web”, which
makes up between 5 and 10 per cent of the iceberg.
The terms “deep web” and “dark web” are often used
interchangeably, but this is incorrect. What they have
in common is that websites on both are not indexed.
However, much of the content on the vast deep web
is legitimate and legal.
We use the deep web when we are doing online
banking, using a private social media account, a
company intranet or accessing our medical details –
in other words, the deep web is all websites that
require access through a dedicated channel.
Some people prefer the privacy the deep web
affords and for their browsing histories not to be
tracked.
The New York Times hosts its website on the deep
web, so that people in countries where access to the
web is heavily censored can still access its content.
Considering the relatively small size of the dark
web, its value is staggering. Estimates put it at
somewhere between US$1 trillion (A$1.3 trillion)
and US$2 trillion (A$2.7 trillion) annually.
BOOM TIME DURING THE PANDEMIC
The dark web was invented in the 1990s, as part of
a research project by the United States Navy, which
sought a means of providing confidential transmissions
over the internet. A decade later, researchers from
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) opened
the dark web to people outside of the military. The
invention of cryptocurrency helped the dark web
flourish, because it added a new layer of anonymity
to transactions.
During the first wave of widespread COVID-19
lockdowns in 2020, the number of dark web forum
users grew by 44 per cent, according to Israeli cyber
intelligence company Sixgill.
There were several reasons for this, chief among
them being that street crime became harder to execute
due to the lockdowns. Just as many criminals took
their businesses online for the first time, the mass shift
to working from home compromised organisations’
cybersecurity levels, creating a perfect cyberstorm.
CORPORATE VICTIMS
Cybercriminals on the dark web target corporations by
stealing confidential data and then putting it up for sale.
According to Dr Campbell Wilson, senior lecturer
and associate dean at the Faculty of Information
Technology at Monash University, who conducted
a targeted crawl of the dark web in 2017 with
permission from the Australian Federal Police,
7.5 per cent of the illegal content on the dark web
is stolen corporate data.