A group of Hyperion Gray researchers published the results of its studies on the Darknet. The outcome was a map of websites available within this network. For this purpose, they utilized the MEMEX project, developed as part of Darpa (Pentagon research department in the US). This enables creating virtual space maps.
The Hyperion Gray Map
The researchers had a list of over 60 000 addresses with the .onion suffix. These sites were automatically crawled in January 2018. Only 6 600 of these generated a response after being tested. The majority, which amounts to around 53 000 addresses, did not respond or returned an error.
The script, on visiting a website, besides the code analysis itself, also took its screenshot. The webpages were then compared and automatically categorized in terms of similar content. The end result of the study was developing an interconnection map enabling, among others, browsing the content of examined sites.
After analysis, it turned out that in most of the websites, the content was illegal under US law. Due to the possibility of viewing the content of such website and the fact that it can be deemed illegal by various legal systems, prior to visiting such websites, a user must confirm being over 18 years of age and accept such risk.
What is Darknet?
This is a network inaccessible to ordinary Internet browsers and search engines. It is based on F2F (friend-to-friend communication – an anonymous web based on only connecting known hosts) ensuring significant anonymity to its users. For this reason, it is often used for criminal activity (we have already addressed this issue many times on our Cyber Blog, e.g., in respect of personal data).
Source: Hyperion Gray
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