Importantly, this secrecy also applies to what the user is looking at. To navigate it you use the Tor browser, similar to Google Chrome or Internet Explorer apart from keeping the identity of the person doing the browsing a secret. The best known, and by far the most popular, darknet is the Onion Router (Tor), which was created by the US Naval Research Labs in the 90s as an enabler of secure communication and funded by the US Department of Defense. Invisible to search engines such as Google, the Dark Web is made possible by darknets – networks which can only be accessed with specific software and authorisation – through networks where connections are made between trusted peers. But what, exactly, is the Dark Web? What is dark web? “Many Dark Web users, or at least those who frequent the top marketplace, go there to purchase illicit drugs,” he says.

When he investigated the Dark Web he found that light drugs were one of the most traded items, with hard drugs, pirated games and stolen accounts alongside. These are the words of Rik Ferguson, vice president of security research at Trend Micro and a special adviser to European Union law enforcement agency Europol. “The Dark Web is an online community accessed by groups with a range of agendas that want to protect their anonymity – whether this be online criminals, activists or those wishing simply to maintain their online privacy.”

Deep web explorer