Dark net trading: the dark space outside the search engine
[Global Technology]
Author: Deng Bing Unit: Peking University New Media Research Institute.
The dark net is usually considered to be closely related to illegal activities, providing criminals with a low-risk cooperation platform and an opportunity to challenge the "border". The covert network based on anonymous communication system has developed into a complex form. However, not only criminals rely on the anonymity of the covert network, law enforcement officers, military institutions and intelligence agencies also need to use the covert network, and they can conduct online monitoring and fishing law enforcement on the covert network, as well as protect anonymous intelligence channels and top secret plans.
Dark network has been frequently used as an illegal trading platform for a long time, and the factors to maintain its stable operation and development are closely related to the trust construction mechanism of dark network market. It is of great reference significance to understand the complexity of the transaction process in the dark market and explore the trust mechanism that affects the dark market transactions, so as to understand and destroy the dark market transactions, maintain the cyberspace order and build a harmonious digital governance system.
1. Dark network: the space explored from the surface network.
In 2006, The Farmer’s Market, the first well-known "dark net", was born. According to the data of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), from 2006 to 2009, "Farmer’s Market" developed more than 3,000 users in all 50 states and 34 other countries and regions. By 2011, the total annual transaction volume exceeded $1 million. "Farmer’s Market" deals in almost all kinds of contraband, among which drugs and controlled drugs are the main ones, and it relies on commission to maintain the operation of the dark net. In its heyday, it was called "Amazon in the field of illegal trading". In April 2012, the US Drug Enforcement Administration cooperated with local police and intelligence departments in the Netherlands, Colombia, Scotland, etc. to crush the "farmers’ market" and arrest eight organizers of different nationalities, including Mark William. In September 2014, the founder William was sentenced to 10 years in prison for drug trafficking and money laundering, and the remaining 7 people were convicted except one who died in prison.
In October 2013, the Silk Road, which sold illegal drugs, provided digital goods such as malicious software and pirated media, forged documents and provided illegal computer intrusion services, was closed down, and its founder Ulbrite was sentenced to life imprisonment. This incident made the "dark net" surface again and attracted attention.
The covert network, also known as the covert network, is a hidden server, which is included in the "deep network". Contrary to the surface network, it exists in the World Wide Web in the covert network. The content that traditional search engines can’t capture requires special software, configuration or permission to log in. It is worth noting that the World Wide Web and the Internet are not synonyms. The World Wide Web is only a part of the Internet, and the websites we can search through traditional search engines are only a part of the World Wide Web-the surface network. The number of domain names in the dark network is 400 to 500 times that of the surface network, and visitors will not leave any traces on it. The deliberately hidden content contained in the dark network may be used for legal purposes, or it may be used to hide criminal acts or other malicious activities. The use of the dark network has attracted the attention of relevant departments and scholars.
At present, the most popular and practical anonymous communication system Tor (onion routing abbreviation) is a common way for individuals to access the dark network. The communication of Tor depends on the network composed of volunteer computer nodes using the software, and all the network traffic of users will be encrypted and transmitted through a series of computer nodes of other users in the network, so that the traffic cannot be traced back to the original users. By establishing "hidden service", service providers and service requesters are anonymous to each other in the whole communication process. Tor-based dark network adopts this protocol to maintain the anonymity of dark network users.
In the dark network, users can browse classified encyclopedia content by using hidden directory web pages, search contraband and other trading content by using hidden search engines, and communicate through private communication methods by using hidden forums, hidden chat rooms and hidden emails. As scholars have said: "A considerable amount of information is missed by search engines because it is hidden in the depths. This deep field of the Internet has unknown breadth, depth, content and users." The covert network provides an anonymous service and platform for activities such as illegal commodity sales and the organization, communication and cooperation of a series of malicious attackers such as criminals, terrorists and spies, enabling users to evade censorship, access banned content and protect sensitive communications. The dark network mainly trades in bitcoin or other digital currency, and mail is the main communication mode in the dark network market. For sellers, customer evaluation is an important evidence of the reputation of businesses.
It should be pointed out that not only criminals rely on the anonymity of dark networks, but also law enforcement officers can deal with a man as he deals with them. In fact, law enforcement personnel, military agencies and intelligence agencies also need to use the dark net. They can conduct on-line monitoring of the dark network, fishing law enforcement, anonymous information channels and top secret plans. Anonymity in the dark network can be used to avoid being censored and attacked by hackers, to protect users from being monitored and eavesdropped, to attack and shut down illegal websites, and to interrupt server attacks and communications.
Although individuals may anonymize activities, researchers have been exploring ways to use security vulnerabilities to infiltrate, de-anonymize and track malicious behaviors. In order to identify the source of malicious attacks online and detect the real destination of network traffic visiting dark websites, researchers are constantly developing "de-anonymization" technology that can identify hidden services and individuals to resist the invasion of criminal forces from dark networks. Anonymity in the covert network can also be used to protect the military command and control system on the battlefield from enemy identification and attack; At the same time, you can also shut down websites or interrupt network attacks to intercept enemy communications; It can also be used for anti-espionage activities and spreading false news. For example, the researchers of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Advanced Intelligence Research Project (IARPA) of the US Department of Defense have explored various methods of "finding people who don’t want to be discovered".
2. Double-edged sword: anonymous technology and dark network resource mining.
The development of dark network economy promotes the rise of anonymous servers, anonymous mailboxes, anonymous mail services and so on. Cryptographic currency has entered the field of vision of ordinary users, but it has brought convenience to people and also opened a new door for economic crimes such as money laundering. The dark net market provides a lower-risk platform for users to illegally trade. In the future, these online black markets will no longer be centrally managed websites such as the Silk Road, but will be a form that disperses the processes of goods, information, payment and feedback, making it more difficult to move.
The quantity and quality of dark network resource information are better than those of surface network. The demand for these resource information makes researchers constantly explore ways to efficiently fill the query interface of dark network and obtain dark network resources. For example, scholars of Nankai University classify the information of dark network resources according to their fields, including finance, internet, literature, chemistry and so on, and each of them contains detailed subcategories. The dark network can be accessed through many anonymous nodes decentralized on the network, including Tor or I2P. When using these anonymous communication tools, the IP address of the user remains hidden all the time, and the IP address displayed by the connection with any target website can be anywhere in fact, so it is difficult to capture the source and location of the user. When using Tor, the website URL will change its format. Websites usually end with the suffix "ion" to identify "hidden services", instead of ending with. com,. org,. net, etc. When using Tor to search the Internet, an onion icon Tor browser is usually displayed. The biggest disadvantage of this service is its slowness.
According to the Dark Net Report published by the Congressional Research Service in 2017, the average number of daily Tor users in the United States is 353,783, accounting for 19.2% of the average daily Tor users. The United States has the largest number of Tor users per day, followed by Russia (11.9%), Germany (9.9%) and United Arab Emirates (9.2%). As for the communication mode on the dark network, individual users usually choose to start with the social news website Reddit. The sub-section of the dark network in the website often provides a dark network entrance, and the website opens up a platform for users to discuss, but it is not encrypted or anonymous. Individuals who want to use a more secure form of communication can choose to use email hosted on Tor, online chat rooms or private communication. Many anonymous instant chat rooms are hosted on Tor, some do not require users to provide any information, and some require users to register through email.
The anonymity and untraceability of the dark network make any user stay anonymous in real time when accessing the dark network, and will not reveal his identity to the server, including criminals who engage in illegal activities. For example, in 2016, official website, a dark trading platform, was attacked by hackers, resulting in a large amount of information in the database being leaked, and countless credit card information and thousands of user accounts being stolen. The attack of "black eating black" not only affected the portal website of cyber criminal gangs, but also affected the original holders of the data.
However, anonymous service is not an absolute weapon for illegal activities to "smooth" the network. In October, 2011, the famous hacker organization Hacktivist launched an attack on the dark net, destroying a website called Freedom Hosting, which hosted more than 40 child pornography websites. Hacktivist obtained the user database of the website, which enabled the FBI to trace the real identity of individuals, and has successfully filed criminal charges against 185 of them.
3. Dark-net payment: the tip of the iceberg of illegal activities
In addition to the anonymity and untraceability of users, traders in the dark world also need to solve the anonymity problem of transaction settlement. Because all countries have strict monitoring methods for the banking system, the criminal behavior based on the dark net will inevitably lead to the tracking risk of the banking system through the traditional bank account. Some scholars believe that the rise of virtual currency such as Bitcoin just solves this problem.
As a payment medium, Bitcoin has impressed the public with its anonymity and privacy since its appearance. Every bitcoin payment record in the digital general ledger is called blockchain, which records the transfer of bitcoin between users (essentially a transaction). Blockchain is a distributed bookkeeping technology. Every transaction will be recorded on it, and everyone who accesses the blockchain will have this account book, so Bitcoin itself has certain transparency, because everyone will get the transaction record. Although the Bitcoin wallet has a unique coded identifier, it does not point to the identity of the trader, so it is impossible to know who the trader behind it is.
Bitcoin was born in 2009, but at the beginning of its birth, Bitcoin was just an encrypted number. It was not until the "Bitcoin Pizza Day" in 2010 that an American programmer bought a pizza worth $30 with 10,000 bitcoins, which made Bitcoin get the value of $0.003 for the first time. In 2011, the "Silk Road" was born, and cryptocurrency officially became the "official" currency in the dark net market. It solves the anonymous problem of traders’ transaction settlement in the dark market, and makes criminal acts get rid of the risk of being tracked by the traditional financial system.
In short, Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency that uses anonymous peer-to-peer transactions. The user’s address is associated and stored in the "e-wallet", which contains the personal "private key"-a series of secret numbers, allowing the person to spend bitcoin from the corresponding e-wallet, similar to a password. The transaction address and encrypted signature are used to verify the transaction. The wallet and private key are not recorded in the public classification of books, and the electronic wallet can be hosted on the network.
Since bitcoin has no issuer, there is no crisis of being frozen like ordinary currency, so it has become a new way for criminals to blackmail. In May 2017, Wanna Cry ransomware became popular all over the world, and virus makers locked in "poisoned" users and demanded to pay a certain amount of bitcoin as the price of unlocking.
Dark networks are usually considered to be closely related to illegal activities, providing criminals with a low-risk cooperation platform, such as using anonymous chat rooms and communication services to plan crimes and spread criminal skills. All kinds of contraband, stolen goods and stolen information can be sold for profit.
When Facebook leaked user information two years ago, some hackers revealed that the sales amount of related user information in the dark network was very cheap, and the really sought-after information was bank accounts and passwords. Ghost Sec, a hacker organization that cracked down on terrorist organizations, once tracked a bitcoin wallet worth $3 million, confirming that virtual currency has become one of the channels for terrorist organizations to raise funds.
However, there is a shortage of activity data about bank accounts and passwords. It is estimated that only about 1.5% of Tor users can access hidden service pages or hidden web pages, and it is unknown how much Tor traffic will flow to any of these websites. It is difficult for ordinary users to touch the boundaries of these websites, and some websites require users to obtain invitation codes to visit.
At the same time, the dark network provides criminals with opportunities to challenge the "boundaries", including physical boundaries, physical-network boundaries, and network boundaries. As long as the network can reach, there is the possibility of crime. A large number of studies tend to describe the dark net as a "safe haven" for illegal activities, and call for the supervision of the dark net to reduce the possibility of breeding crimes. Based on the characteristics of easy access, strong concealment, special transaction mode and great harm to public safety, dark network can easily become a channel for spreading obscene information, a platform for trading illegal goods and a safe haven for terrorism. Some researchers believe that to improve the supervision mechanism of dark network, we should first strengthen the prevention and control of propaganda information about dark network, strengthen the supervision of logistics industry and raise users’ awareness of confidentiality. Some scholars also believe that it is difficult to solve the problem of dark network. The most important point is that the complexity of transnational crime and anonymous mechanism make the threat posed by dark network not limited by region, especially the advantages of blockchain technology provide great convenience for the criminal activities of dark network. Scholars who study the terrorist crimes in the dark net believe that even though criminals in the dark net are more concealed in ways and means than those in the surface net, in order to improve their anonymity and security, users need to update their tools frequently and be familiar with all kinds of auxiliary software, thus raising the technical threshold for using the dark net. Therefore, the criminal activities in the dark net are auxiliary in function and are not the "culprit" of rampant criminal activities.
4. Dark Net Sellers: How to Build Trust
Although trust is a very personal emotion, under the escort of anonymous technology, sellers of dark networks must also expand their user groups and market their products, technologies and services by building trust with buyers. Reputation is as important to dark net sellers as to surface net and real buyers. For a dark network that cannot conduct face-to-face transactions and is not bound by any trading laws and regulations, buyers should not be able to establish trust with sellers under normal circumstances. However, the actual situation is just the opposite. It is rare to fail to deliver goods or sell defective products on the dark network. Based on the research conducted by Nicolas Christin, a scholar at Carnegie Mellon University, on 184,804 feedbacks on the Silk Road in eight months, the favorable rate of products on the dark network is as high as 97.8%.
Like Airbnb landlords or sellers of surface online shopping platforms, the "suppliers" in the dark network also attach great importance to their "brand" reputation and customer satisfaction. Generally speaking, the supplier interface of the secret network will contain the following information: the total amount of transactions completed, the registration time of suppliers, the last login time of suppliers, other important aliases of suppliers, competitive advantage, refund strategy, postage and delivery method. Make sure that even if the buyer doesn’t buy the goods they offer in the end, he will be deeply impressed by the credibility of the seller.
In fact, the marketing strategy used in the dark network is an imitation of the marketing strategy of ordinary e-commerce They will not only present product pictures on the page, and mark the price, place of shipment, place of delivery, inventory, creation and update time, seller’s evaluation, etc., but also have discount activities (such as buying two for one), special member prices and additional benefits to provide a refund guarantee for dissatisfied buyers. Dark net sellers will even promote sales through marketing techniques such as "limited inventory" and "limited supply". Some suppliers who are eager to occupy the market or newly established will establish their brand image by providing services such as "free samples", "the lowest in the whole network" and "evaluating transactions", and will also promote promotional activities by setting up "festivals" in the dark network. For example, the dark net will also celebrate "Black Friday" and carry out discount activities. The future of the dark network market does not depend on anonymous networks, bitcoin, or other encryption methods. What can really retain customers is excellent user service and experience.
Competitiveness, credibility and sincerity are the three basic elements for dark net sellers to build trust. In order to highlight the reliability, the buyer encourages the seller to comment on the speed of reply, whether the communication is smooth, and whether the way of transporting the goods is safe enough. Feedback from buyers, whether positive or negative, cannot be deleted. "Good credit mechanism" attracts sellers from offline market to dark net. Generally speaking, we don’t equate the dark net with the ordinary online community, but there is a strong sense of community in the dark net market. For example, users will chat in the community on Reddit (social media platform) and publicly condemn the sellers who are dissatisfied with the dark net. As james martin, an American management and information expert, explained in his research on drugs in the dark net, the dark net has its own order, and the users in the dark net also look at other people’s behaviors with the standard of honesty, without relying on experience or individual evaluation, but relying on the group judgment of the whole dark net community to make a choice.
Some related industries came into being, for example, some websites will use professional testers to provide random testing services for drugs sold in the dark net. For example, a dark network website will immediately update the dark network market ranking and product testing progress with the highest favorable rate. Users can send the purchased samples to a drug testing laboratory independently established by the community for testing, and then they will feed back the test results to users. No matter "cutting corners" or "shoddy", the results will be published on this website, revealing the information of suppliers who sell such products, and untrusted suppliers will be expelled from the dark market.
As mentioned above, every bitcoin payment record in the digital general ledger is called blockchain, which records the transfer of bitcoin between users. This distributed bookkeeping technology enables the dark network to form an independent virtual society, with its own independent and closed credit system, which is not controlled by the offline credit system, and is also difficult to be tracked by means of supervising criminal activities.
A few days ago, officials of the US Securities and Exchange Commission issued a statement saying that Bitcoin and Ethereum are not securities. Previously, they also warned users about the risks of Bitcoin trading. The Chinese government completely bans virtual currency ICO (initial currency issue, blockchain term) such as Bitcoin, which makes the trading prospect of cryptocurrency in the mainstream market confusing. Despite the constraints of circulation, investors still hold expectations for the future development of Bitcoin, and it is obviously inappropriate to weaken the dark network transaction and its concealment by restricting the withdrawal of cryptocurrency.
Guangming Daily (14th edition, August 13th, 2020)
Source: Guangming Net-Guangming Daily








