“Apparently this young man was able to obtain them over the Internet. So they are not illegal. They are used for things like rat poison and other things,” explains Sherry Llewellyn, Howard County Police spokesperson. As CBS News Correspondent Joie Chen reports, popular high school senior Benjamin Vassiliev was allegedly poisoned by a friend who viewed the victim as a rival for a girl’s affections. The use of the dark web usually means that you are attempting to engage in activity that you could not otherwise carry out in the public eye. After a failed attempt to buy the substance from a legitimate online chemical merchant, authorities said, Siesser never came close to actually acquiring dimethylmercury, as he was caught during an undercover FBI investigation. According to the Department of Justice, he was sent a “controlled delivery” of inert substances instead.
Are Dark Websites Illegal To Use And Visit?

For some users, portions of the deep web offer the opportunity to bypass local restrictions and access TV or movie services that may not be available in their local areas. Others go somewhat deeper to download pirated music or steal movies that aren’t yet in theaters. The deep web rests below the surface and accounts for approximately 90% of all websites. This would be the part of an iceberg beneath the water, much larger than the surface web.

Forensic detectives found at least five types of poison in Lin’s blood, including mercury and tetrodotoxin, a neurotoxin typically derived from puffer fish. After his arrest, police managed to track down one of his customers in the UK. Kuntal Patel, 37, was sentenced to three years for possessing poison she purchased from Korff. Jesse Korff, 20, was sentenced to nine years in prison in February for manufacturing ricin and then selling it on the dark web.
Dark Web, Not Dark Alley: Why Drug Sellers See The Internet As A Lucrative Safe Haven

As listed above in our article, even respected organizations like the BBC and ProPublica have a version of their site on the dark web. Keybase is a fantastic onion website that lets you cryptographically bring your different online identities together. It has a feature called CoinJoin that combines multiple coins from different users into a single transaction. This makes it extremely difficult to find out who you are transacting with. Wasabi is one of the most popular cryptocurrency wallets on the dark web.
Tor Metrics
Accessing blocked content can result in being placed on a watch list or imprisonment. Law enforcers can use custom software to infiltrate the dark web and analyze activities. You could be monitored closely even if you are not doing anything illegal. If the above average Joe’s explanation isn’t enough for you, below are some legitimate reasons to use the Dark Web in a bit more detail. Activists and government critics prefer to remain anonymous, fearing repercussions if their identities are revealed. Besides, victims of crime may want to hide their identities from their perpetrators.
Illegal Pornography
Stay updated on the latest threats and ensure your data remains secure by leveraging these advanced solutions like Lunar. These RATs are often sold on dark web forums and are frequently bundled with other malware as part of larger attacks. Faison was arrested and charged this month with attempting to acquire a chemical weapon. It means unless you use a VPN that encrypts your internet traffic, they always receive all information about you and your digital life.
- On the dark web, you’re expected to find illegal and prescription drugs (including Marijuana).
- The post discusses recent developments in the Raspberry Robin malware, highlighting its evolution to become stealthier and its use of one-day exploits.
- Women, when they do kill, reportedly use guns about half the time; followed by knives; followed by large, heavy objects.
- This includes military-grade 256-bit encryption reinforced with a 2048-bit DH key and SHA2-384 authentication to ensure your traffic arrives at its destination safely.
Is The Darknet Dangerous Or Illegal?

Dream boasts almost the same number of listings for other products, including items that purport to be designer clothes, counterfeit money and stolen online banking information. According to the RCMP’s national headquarters and municipal police forces in cities such as Calgary, there are growing indications that the drug trade is increasingly moving to the dark web. The small manila envelope looks the same as countless other parcels the postal service delivers each day.
How Private Satellites Are Quietly Changing Intern
It’s a highly lucrative industry and one that is not likely to end any time soon. However, thanks to its encrypted cloak of invisibility, the darknet inevitably attracts some of the shadier sides of life, although opinions are divided as to the scale of it. Amid the human-driven ecological unraveling, the illegal wildlife trade poses one of the greatest threats to many species’ continued existence. Alas, the internet has allowed this trade to flourish more easily than ever. DeepdarkCTI is a project dedicated to sourcing valuable Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) from the depths of the Deep and Dark Web.
In case you’re wondering how to access the deep web, chances are you already use it daily. The term “deep web” refers to all web pages that that are unidentifiable by search engines. Deep web sites may be concealed behind passwords or other security walls, while others simply tell search engines to not “crawl” them. Transactions on the dark web are conducted with cryptocurrency due to its decentralized and anonymous nature.
Tips For Safe Access To The Dark Web

In the first arc of the anime series Lupin the 3rd Part V, Lupin III steals digital currency from the “Marco Polo” darknet market. Whilst a great many products are sold, drugs dominate the numbers of listings, with the drugs including cannabis, MDMA, modafinil,108109110 LSD, cocaine, and designer drugs. The months and years after Silk Road’s closure were marked by a greatly increased number of shorter-lived markets as well as semi-regular law enforcement takedowns, hacks, scams and voluntary closures. For several years, Yahoo was at the apex as the internet’s best web service provider, offering… If the VPN connection fails, the automatic kill switch will kick in, temporarily breaking your traffic.
- The Tor Metrics is a good place to get more information about the Tor project.
- Russia has long had a state-run poison-factory, set up in the early 20th century by the founding head of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, as part of the Kremlin’s massive chemical and biological weapons programme.
- Task Force Argos investigators then effectively ran the site “while feeding information to international law enforcement colleagues”.
- Normal search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo don’t index this part of the web due to its illegal nature.
- Many users now leverage Tor to browse both the public Internet and the deeper parts of the web privately.
In many cases, people fall victim to fake marketplaces, where they pay for products (such as illegal substances or hacking tools) but never receive what they paid for. Without any recourse for recovery, users can find themselves financially and legally compromised. Norton 360 Deluxe provides a comprehensive suite of protection that can help block malware and dangerous links in real time, and even detect scams using cutting-edge AI detection. Plus, it features a built-in VPN to encrypt your connection, hiding your IP address and online activity, for more anonymous and private browsing.

If you know the right websites, you can easily access a tremendous amount of information, including research articles, news stories, and more. Check out these best onion sites to access the dark web securely and anonymously. We strongly recommend confining all surfing to the surface web—and help secure your data, online identity, and devices with a multi-layered solution like Avira Free Security. It blends performance, online privacy, and online protection into a single (free!) app. The integrated Software Updater, VPN, Password Manager, and more, create the convenient and trusted foundation on which to build a safer digital life.
There are some established methods for law enforcement sharing information across borders. Specialist online units in Australia, such as Task Force Argos in the Queensland Police Service, have also used “poisoned watering hole” tactics. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Playpen is the largest known US government hacking operation. Without proper checks, police could have significantly expanded scope to search homes and computers around the world, even in cases not involving CEM. For example, the Freedom of Information Foundation has long advocated for the use of the Dark Web in enabling free speech in repressive regimes. By offering secure communication channels, it gives people in oppressive states the opportunity to connect with the outside world and engage in activism without facing the consequences of being identified.
The dark web hosts a range of content including stolen data, hacking tools, illegal marketplaces, whistleblower documents, and anonymous forums. The Tor network, renowned for its privacy-preserving architecture, provides anonymity through onion routing. However, its exit nodes—the final relay points that connect Tor traffic to the public internet—are vulnerable to exploitation. Exit node poisoning is one such technique that adversaries use to manipulate or intercept traffic, posing significant risks to individuals and organizations alike.