Don’t click on links you don’t know where they go because you might bump into all sorts of things you don’t want to see and can’t un-see. The database showed a list of real people who were willing to pay to get people killed. Around two dozen people had paid Besa Mafia thousands of dollars in Bitcoin to have people killed. Mostly it was husband and wife situations or scorned lovers, with a mix of male and females, from all over the world. Chris and I contacted the police and sent them the link to the database. Tor Search is a very efficient search engine because it indexes new content all day from the TOR network.
Best Dark Web Sites 2025 – Detailed List
Regular browsers like Chrome or Firefox do not support .onion domains. Using a VPN, such as Forest VPN, adds an additional layer of encryption on top of Tor’s built-in security. This helps to protect your IP address from being exposed and ensures that your browsing activity remains private, even from your internet service provider. This browser is the most suitable option for accessing the dark web, thanks to its multiple layers of encryption. Each time you connect to a dark web link, your request and traffic are routed through at least three different server points, ensuring your IP remains hidden. Ahmia is a safe alternative search engine for users who prefer the dark web.
Sci-Hub is a massive database that eliminates the barriers to getting scientific knowledge. It contains millions of scientific research documents from around the world. The site seeks to liberate information by making it free to individuals and institutions. Awazon became the successor of the popular AlphaBay market, which the authorities shut down successfully in July 2023. Like any other site of such nature, Awazon Market isn’t free from risks, so be careful while accessing it. Even without monitoring your browsing activities, DuckDuckGo will offer decent answers to your questions.
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As a result, we want you to stay safe and anonymous by using a paid VPN service whenever you surf this dark web platform. For individuals in locations facing strict restrictions or those under oppressive governments, ProPublica is the perfect platform to share their stories. ProPublica aims to bring controversial, repressed stories into the open for all to see. It publishes news in English and other major languages like Italian and Spanish. If you make use of a password manager, then it may come with a feature that monitors the dark web for mentions of your email address and password, or any other personal details.
Measuring CSAM Hosted Through The Tor Network
By routing traffic through a random combination of servers worldwide, the darknet obfuscates the identity of its users, making it an attractive medium for journalists, dissidents, and individuals committing crimes. Since 2008, access to the darknet has been facilitated by the The Onion Router (TOR) browser, bringing the darknet within reach of an increasingly wider audience. Tens of thousands of darknet forums serve the criminal needs of millions of users each day and hundreds of these darknet forums are especially dedicated to the exchange of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM).
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The search engine has indexed over 400,000 pages, and you can ask it to match your exact search term. You can easily find what you are looking for, even links to hidden dark web rooms. The platform utilizes end-to-end encryption, ensuring it does not store any activity records. Like other email clients on the dark web, it does not require you to give your personal information. It is a Swiss-based company (privacy-friendly country), and all its tools are open-source, meaning anyone can test its vulnerabilities. Hence, even if you hide your IP address, you aren’t completely secure.
Email Services
Users encountered by law enforcement on Dark Web platforms are anonymous. As such, their offline identities are not (yet) known, and they have yet to be apprehended. While sampling apprehended offenders makes sense when using research findings to inform risk assessment procedures and psychological interventions, it is more problematic to use such samples to inform the policing of offenders who have not yet been identified.
Use The Tor Browser
Published by the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the report documents a significant increase in digitally altered or completely synthetic images featuring children in explicit scenarios, with one forum sharing 3,512 images and videos over a 30 day period. Offenders were also documented sharing advice and even AI models fed by real images with each other. Repetitive pornography use has similar effects to substance addiction31. Many people continually use CSAM and display addictive behaviours32, and the intensity of CSAM use often has properties that users call addictive33. In the search engine data, we notice that users who seek help often refer to their condition as ‘child porn addiction’. Understanding the commonalities between CSAM use and addiction is beneficial to prevention and treatment.
- As a result, you can face criminal investigations and charges, as well as criminal penalties such as prison time and fines.
- Riseup provides email and chat services that keep no record of your online activity.
- “Finding these perpetrators on the normal web is hard, but it’s even harder on the dark web. They use the latest technology to keep evading authorities. With the likes of IA, it is becoming a double-aged sword.”
- You can’t access the dark web without the use of an anonymous browser known as Tor.
- Three prominent Tor search engines – Ahmia.fi, OnionLand, and Onion Search Engine – display our questionnaire to the user who searched for CSAM.
- The offender in Ohio, a site administrator named Jason Gmoser, “went to great lengths to hide” his conduct, according to the documents.
In 2018, the USENIX Security Symposium article ‘How Do Tor Users Interact With Onion Services? ’ presents an online survey of 517 Tor users where several users are concerned about CSAM; however, this does not lead to any further analysis in the paper, and it avoids mentioning child abuse12. In addition to these tools, you need to exercise extreme caution when browsing on the dark web because there are tons of phishing and malicious sites on there. Only use .onion links that come from legitimate sources like The Hidden Wiki.
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This is technically possible because of the accurate, text-based detection of CSAM that we demonstrate, and furthermore, the CSAM phrase detection list can be shared between search engines. While we read texts from the websites, we see numerous CSAM websites that claim to share gigabytes of media and thousands of videos and images. To find .onion links for dark web sites, you’ll need to use a dark web search engine. Many of them are safe for beginners to use since they filter out dangerous/illegal content to only provide safe .onion links. My favorites are DuckDuckGo (usually the Tor browser’s default search engine), The Hidden Wiki, and Ahmia.
According to the police, the forum had been online for 2 years and, at the time it was shut down, had over 400,000 registered members. Three of the men arrested were accused of founding and maintaining the forum, and one was described as one of the forum’s most active users, contributing over 3500 posts. Research conducted in 2015 found there were 900 child sexual abuse forums like “Boystown” active on the darknet at the time, together receiving an average of 168,152 requests per day (Owen and Savage 2015). Generative AI is exacerbating the problem of online child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), as watchdogs report a proliferation of deepfake content featuring real victims’ imagery. Based on result click statistics, we rank the top 26 most visited search engines online on 17 March 2023. To determine whether CSAM is permitted in search results, we test the searches ‘child’, ‘sex’, ‘videos’, ‘love’, and ‘cute’, then study the search results.
You are more likely to be caught if it’s coming from a highly-flagged country like the Netherlands. For a couple of years I drank the Kool Aid, I really believed in his vision and what he was doing with Silk Road. So after he was arrested when the police said he had ordered hits, even though we know the hits were not carried out, I didn’t believe it. I thought it was just part of the government’s narrative to turn people against him, because he had this cult-like following. You make excuses that he was painted into a corner but the fact is, for all his talk of being a peace-seeking libertarian and someone who was providing a violence-free environment to buy drugs, he was willing to use violence to protect his empire. But the point was there were all these people out there paying very real money in very large sums to carry out violence and murders.
Some markets are relatively short-lived (thanks to law enforcement), but others are notorious enough that they survive, for instance, Silk Road, AlphaBay, and Hansa. The Dark Web is the part of the deep web that is not indexed by search engines, like Google or Bing. For this reason, you cannot browse through these sites using your default search engine.
To protect yourself against any legal repercussions, you should consider using NordVPN. Therefore, you will always find updated search results while using this service. In addition, you can connect your Keybase account with X, GitHub, or Reddit to let people easily trust that they are talking to the actual person. Also, the platform has a feature of automatic deletion of messages – set a timer and they will be deleted after a set period. Another standout feature is that the servers can’t see what you type, copy, paste, or send. To increase the security level, add password protection and determine the expiration time for messages.
Further research is needed to develop deterrence and intervention strategies within these CSAM darknet forums, which could potentially reduce the number of potential or onset individuals accessing CSAM. Academic research on perpetrators and victims of child sexual abuse is also regularly discussed in darknet CSAM communities. Forum members do seem to cherry pick results that align with their beliefs, or twist research outcomes so as to validate their viewpoints. Within CSAM forums, these viewpoints are then spread to other community members as fact. The anonymity provided by the darknet also offered a new venue to access and exchange CSAM, connecting demand and supply on an unprecedented global scale. The growing availability of smartphones with ever better cameras also blurred the distinction between consumers and producers, further increasing the amount of CSAM circulating.
