The six-month study sought to register hidden services for the so-called "dark network" and find out which are the most popular. The result was to uncover many illegal drug trafficking websites, but mostly child pornography websites. Unfortunately, research has shown that it is extremely difficult to locate the people behind these pages.
The Tor (The Onion Router) this is an incognito network that allows people to access the web without revealing their traces, which encourages all kinds of illegal activity.
According to Dr Gareth Owen of the University of Portsmouth and colleagues, trafficking in Tor it is on average 1,5% of the general daily movements on the internet, while around 80,000 banned sites were discovered within it.
"We managed to visit most of the banned services only once, as they are not large duration of life," Owen argued when unveiling his research at the 31st House Communication Conference in Hanover.
The research also proved that most hidden services involved the sale of illegal substances, while black pages were also found market, email services but also those dealing with virtual currency Bitcoin.
As far as child violence is concerned, Owen argued that despite the fact that Tor does not have many specific photos, the users who visit them are driven to other identical content. It's no wonder that the percentage of traffic to such sites is 75%!
"We can not know what percentage of people and machines. We just can not know, "he said
Roger Dingdelain, one of the creators of Tor, pointed out that the methodology of this research is more suitable for networks that include long-lived websites. That's why it turned out to be a difficult task to log the history of visitors' movements on Tor.
"Without knowing how many websites were searched and then disappeared, it is impossible to know the percentage of violence websites.
"There are important uses for hidden services, such as when human rights activists use it to gain access to Facebook or anonymous blogs. Uses for hidden services are new and have great potential, "he concluded.
