While most everyone is familiar with the idea that there’s a “dark side” to the Internet, a majority of web users are unaware of what sort of content, if you will, these hidden sites host.
Dr. Gareth Owen recently concluded a six-month study in which his team catalogued this part of the Web and worked out which areas were most popular.
Specifically, the University of Portsmouth professor set up a group of servers to join the Tor network and index the hidden services found on it. For those unfamiliar, Tor stands for “The Onion Router”, and it is an anomyzing system that allows Internet users to use the Web without revealing who they are nor what country they’re from.
The effectiveness of Tor has encouraged several people to set up hidden “.onion” sites that offers content, services, and goods that are otherwise illegal to sell openly.
All said, traffic to hidden services on Tor represents approximately 1.5% of all the data passing across the Internet on any given day.
The system Dr. Owen set up visited Tor-supported sites and downloaded the page’s HTML content to see if (A) it could be categorized and (B) how many visits it received.
Over the six months, Dr. Owen and his team saw about 80,000 hidden sites on Tor.
“Most of the hidden services we only saw once. They do not tend to exist for a very long time,” he said during a speech at the 31st Chaos Communications Congress in Hanover, where he presented his findings.
The top 40 services within the Tor network were involved with controlling botnets, most of which were already shut down, leaving the client computers uselessly polling Tor seeking the now inactive command systems.
Beyond botnets though, the biggest number of active hidden services were dedicated to the illegal selling of drugs. Also popular — underground markets, fraud sites, mail services, and sites dealing with the virtual currency Bitcoin.
One of the more unfortunate findings in the study was the amount of traffic dedicated to viewing images of abuse; specifically, child abuse.
The number of sites hosting this content on Tor is small, but the total amount of traffic to them is significantly more than that going to other sites said Dr. Owen. He guesstimated that about 75% of the traffic studied ended up at abuse sites.
“When we found this out we were stunned,” he said. “This is not what we expected at all.”
He did elaborate, though, that it was hard to tell which visits were made by people, and which were done by machines.
“It's not as quite as straightforward as it looks,” he said. “It might look like there are lots of people visiting these sites but it is difficult to conclude that from this information.”
“What proportion are people and which are something else? We simply don't know,” he said, adding that “crawlers” are able to skirt law enforcement and other agencies tasked with policing these sites.
One of the original developers of Tor, Roger Dingledine, said Dr. Owen’s methodology, which only scanned long-established sites to what content was there, makes it hard to draw concultions about what, exactly, people do on the network.
“Without knowing how many sites disappeared before he got around to looking at them, it's impossible to know what percentage of fetches went to abuse sites,” he said.
“There are important uses for hidden services, such as when human rights activists use them to access Facebook or to blog anonymously,” Dingledine added. “These uses for hidden services are new and have great potential.”
Via BBC
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