

To put it more precisely, the surface web accounts for areas of the internet that search engines can “crawl” and index for search. In all, the surface web contains any destination you can reach through search. You only need to fire up your browser and go. It’s all the blogs, shops, social media sites, and so on that you visit regularly. The sights you’ll see within the surface web will look familiar. Yet, the typical internet user only has access to the first few feet, a layer of the internet known as the surface web. If you visualize the internet as an ocean, you’ll find it populated with websites and collections of data at all depths. The layers of the internet: The surface web and the deep web That starts with a look at the internet and the two primary layers that make it up.

Yet that anonymity doesn’t stop us from putting a face onto the dark web-from understanding what it is, where it is, and what transpires there. With that, it’s home to a mixed bag of activity, legitimate and illicit alike. Even Facebook is there, providing people access to the social media site in regions where it’s blocked.Īnonymity reigns on the dark web. Journalists, activists, and everyday citizens use it as well, often to work around oppressive censorship. News outlets like the BBC and the New York Times have a presence there, as does the U.S. And they’re far from the only people who use it. Yet cybercriminals didn’t create the dark web. Plenty of cybercrime can get traced right back to the dark web. We often mention the dark web in our blogs, typically when the conversation turns to identity theft, data breaches, and stolen personal information. As a result, it has a reputation for harboring criminal activity. It’s a small and highly anonymous layer of the internet. The story of the dark web is a complicated one. What is the dark web, really? Where is it? Can anyone hop on it?Īnswering these questions can help you stay safer online.
