The dark web is a part of the Internet that is not accessible to the general public. Moreover, it can only be accessed by employing special software, such as TOR browser, so that users can remain anonymous on the worldwide web to perform different activities. Besides, aalicious actors and cybercriminals can use the dark web to sell and buy illegal goods and perform their transactions through cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin.
Before discussing about the dark web, let us have a brief overview of the Internet, the deep web, and the dark web. Internet is a worldwide system of computer networks and the Internet, as we know is the go-to place for any information we want to consume regarding anything. The information we get on the Internet or online is produced by someone and posted for people to access, either by paying for it or free of charge. Either way, the online information is indexed by the search engines and made available for us to access through the popular web browsers. At a very high level, this is how the information on the Internet reaches its users. However, as some people would like to refer it, the information we get through the Internet is tip of the iceberg. Besides, there is a lot more information that ordinary web browsers and users cannot access through the traditional way of searching the web. That is where the notions of the deep web and the dark web concepts comes into play.
The deep web is where the huge amount of unindexed information in the worldwide web (www) resides on. Moreover, the deep web is the section of the Internet that is not indexed by the web crawlers or popular search engines, such as Google and Bing.
The dark web, on the other hand, is the section of the deep web where information is deliberately hidden from the rest of the Internet users. Information in the dark web is not accessible through normal web browsers rather it is accessed only through specialized tools such as TOR browsers. TOR, which stands for The Onion Router, is mechanism to exchange information online anonymously through hiding of the identity of the user. People who live in oppressive regimes, and who are whistleblowers make use of the TOR browser to access and publish information online. The dark web is also used for illegal transaction mostly through cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.