Page 74 - Cyber Warnings

A Dive into the Dark World of the Internet

What is the Deep Web & Dark Web?

By Sarosh Petkar, BS/MS Student, Computing Security - RIT

For the majority of us, the Internet is limited to a mere ten, twenty or at most fifty websites. All of
our daily content revolves around those handful of websites and in some philosophical way that
is our world. However, in reality, the Internet is enormous with around 1 billion websites that are
hosted on various servers all around the world.

The growing notion within the tech world is that, we as users only see the tip of the iceberg and
according to researchers, only 4% of the Internet is visible to the general public. This leads to
the introduction of terms such as the Deep Web, Dark Internet and the Darknet, which tend to
showcase presence of the hidden part of the internet which many people are unaware of.

Due to the lack of understanding of the topic, those who know about the deep web, confuse it
with the dark Internet or dark web and vice-versa. However, the truth is, the three of them are
completely different and a deep-dive into these concepts with an element of nuance reveals
how.

Metaphorically speaking, the entire internet is like an ocean, where the World Wide Web is the
surface of the ocean where people may find broken beer bottles and certain kinds of living
organisms, the Deep Web is the place where explorers haven’t been, and finally the Dark Web
is the absolute bottom of the ocean (Kingdom of Hades).

Figure 1: The composition of the Web.
74 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – July 2017 Edition
Copyright © Cyber Defense Magazine, All rights reserved worldwide