The six-month study sought to register hidden services about the so-called "dark network" and find out which of them are the most popular. The result was to expose many websites dealing in illegal substances, but mainly child pornography websites. Unfortunately, research has shown that it is extremely difficult to trace the people behind these pages.
The Tor (The Onion Router) it is an anonymous browsing network, which allows people to enter the Internet without revealing their tracks, which encourages all kinds of illegal activity.
According to Dr. Gareth Owen from the University of Portsmouth and his colleagues, the attendance at Tor is an average of 1,5% of the most general daily traffic on the internet, while within it 80,000 was found to be a forbidden site.
"Most of the prohibited services have been visited only once because they are not long-lasting," Owen argued at the revelation of his research at the 31 Hanover Communication Conference in Hanover.
The survey also revealed that most of the hidden services concerned the sale of illicit substances, and black market pages, e-mail services, and those dealing with the virtual currency Bitcoin were also found.
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 the secret services, such as when human rights activists use it to obtain access on Facebook or anonymous blogs. The uses for hidden services are new and have great potential," he concluded.
