DARK WEB--AS CHALLENGE OF THE CONTEMPORARY INFORMATION AGE.

• Author: Denic, Nenad V.

1. The Dark Web impact

   Dark Web, a space on the Internet, is the logical structure mainly made to protect user identity and hide network activities. Following the 5D (disinformation, deception, destabilization, disruption, and tailored destruction) warfare era, the ability to hide the identity and intentions of actors in cyberspace are a supporting asset, and Dark Web has become a powerful tool against state security. The Dark Web was a communication infrastructure for terrorist activities more than a decade ago. The network offered users complete identity hiding and high-quality, robust, and cheap encryption. Combining the network services with cryptocurrencies the Dark Web has been the space for indoctrination, recruitment, propaganda, and terrorist training. Covid-19 pandemic has pushed terrorism from the main information arena. Services of the Dark Web significantly influenced the information environment and became tools for propaganda, conspiracy theories, and selling medication for Covid-19 treatment. However, the Russian aggression against Ukraine has become a war with information. The operational environment of both sides has one more tool. It is the Dark Web, where both sides utilize services to their advantage. Therefore, the Dark Web has a significant impact on the global information environment. The Dark Web as the network for identity and activity protection in the cyber domain represents a global security risk during the war against terror, Covid-19 pandemic, and contemporary conflicts.

2. The online quest for safety and anonymity

   The Internet, the network of all networks is supposed to provide all users with the same rights and possibilities. However, the Internet has to provide a certain level of security and anonymity for all users. The level of anonymity and security has shown a downward trend after the year 2000. States are increasingly exercising control over cyberspace to increase security in the physical domain. Average users of the Internet are searching for services using search engines. Internet search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, and Ask are very useful tools in search for information. The popularity of the search engines depends on the region, but the use of the search engine also depends on the device used by users, for example, phones with the Android operating system use Google as the default search engine, while devices with the Microsoft operating system use the default, Bing. The most popular internet search engine in the world for all platforms (mobile phone, tablet, desktop laptop) from the data of internet site Statcounter GlobalStats is Google with a share of 92.20%, the second is Bing with 3.42% share (Statcounter Global Stats 2022). Internet search engines use an automatized process to gather as much data as possible on the Internet. Specialized software analyze databases made by indexed words for every document. When users search for a certain term, search engines use their algorithms to check the database and provide information about the term. The user generally receives information that depends on the algorithm of the internet search engine. Internet pages allow the previously mentioned specialized programs to collect data from them to make the page visible to as many users as possible. In most cases, website administrators optimize their pages so the search engines rank them in higher positions when the algorithm sends information to the user. In most cases, website administrators optimize their pages so that search engines rank them higher. The average Internet user thinks that the Internet is all that he can find using some internet search engines. However, the Internet is much larger than search engines can index. The total percentage of indexed data on the Internet is estimated at 5% (60 Minutes CBS News 2015). The rest of the unindexed web pages is called the Deep Web, Hidden Web, or Invisible Web. The mentioned estimate of 5% is based on the total Internet traffic.

   At the very beginning of the Internet, web pages were static and easy to index, but with the development of new technologies, things are becoming more and more complex. Dynamic web pages appear that cannot be indexed by conventional web browsers. A static website is linked to a single location on the Internet and the data on that page changes from time to time. On the other hand, dynamic internet pages are more complex and the only thing that is relatively constant is the page frame, while the data on the page depends on the data requested by the user. These pages are created based on user data requests and they are populated from related sources. Dynamic pages are becoming increasingly common, and therefore the unindexed part of the space between what is visible and what is invisible on the Internet has started to grow. The term Invisible Web was introduced in 1994. In that period, the term referred to information that was not visible to conventional Internet browsers (Bergman 2001).

   The phrase Invisible Web was used until 2001 when Mihcael K. Bergman in his research paper "The deep web: Surfacing Hidden Value" introduced the new term Deep Web. An antonym of the Deep Web becomes Surface Web which was previously referred on Visible Web. The term Invisible Web only refers to web pages that are not indexed by search engines. However, the Deep Web encompasses more than just sites that cannot be accessed directly via traditional search engines. It also includes Internet content that meets any of the following criteria:

1. Inaccessible to current conventional search engines.

2. Accessible only for targeted queries or keywords.

3. Protected from search engine crawlers.

4. Protected by security mechanisms (login ID, password).

5. Protected by a logical or encrypted structure that is inaccessible from outside.

   After the year 2000, Internet search engines improved so that they could collect information from databases of dynamic internet pages. Bergman in his work estimates that the Deep Web is 500 times larger than the surface network. It is assumed that the surface network is only 0.25 to 5 percent of the total Internet. The estimate of the size of the Surface Web is based on the data obtained by monitoring the status of the Internet. Currently, the Internet is used by slightly more than 5.46 billion users, while in the same period of 2016, the number of Internet users was 3.48 billion (Country Cassette--Real Time World Statistics 2022), (Denic 2017). Internet users have grown by about 57% in the last 6 years, making it the fastest-growing multinational shared domain. This multinational domain is part of the world's information domain, economy, state apparatus, army, etc. To protect their national interests, governments are legalizing control of the Internet on their territory and beyond. This control has already been established by various actors.

   The first example of a state that controls activities on the Internet is the Russian Federation. The Russian government established control over all electronic communication in 1996 (Blake 2016). The System for Operative Investigative Activities - SORM [phrase omitted] is a system that all service providers must implement. The SORM is a set of equipment that...