As of last month it had 508,721 registered users. Several high-profile onion services hosting child sex abuse material have been shut down following extensive cross-jurisdictional law enforcement operations, including The Love Zone website in 2014, PlaypEn in 2015 and Child’s Play in 2017.Ī recent effort led by German police, and involving others including Australian Federal Police, Europol and the FBI, resulted in the shutdown of the illegal website Boystown in May.īut one of the largest child sex abuse material forums on the internet (not just Tor) has evaded law enforcement (and activist) takedown attempts for a decade. That said, some services have started charging fees for content. The majority of those involved aren’t in it for money, so most of this material is simply swapped. Only about 7.5% of the child sex abuse material on the Tor network is estimated to be sold for a profit. That said, the same study found from a single data capture that about 80% of traffic to onion services was directed to services which did offer illegal porn, abuse images and/or child sex abuse material.Īnother study estimated 53.4% of the 170,000 or so active onion domains contained legal content, suggesting 46.6% of services had content which was either illegal, or in a grey area.Īlthough scams make up a significant proportion of these services, cryptocurrency services, drug deals, malware, weapons, stolen credentials, counterfeit products and child sex abuse material also feature in this dark part of the internet. This suggests most users access the network to retain their online privacy, rather than use anonymous onion services. Of the estimated 2.6 million users that use the Tor network daily, one study reported only 2% (52,000) of users accessed onion services. Among the visited services, child sex abuse material is common. The architecture of the network allows partial monitoring of the network traffic and a summary of which services are visited. The number of onion services active on the Tor network is unknown, although the Tor Project estimates about 170,000 active addresses. Wikimedia Commons Child sex abuse material and abuse porn is prevalent Service dictionaries such as “The Hidden Wiki” list addresses on the network, allowing users to discover other (often illicit) services. The BBC, New York Times, ProPublica, Facebook, the CIA and Pornhub all have a verified presence on Tor, to name a few. And while search engine options are limited (there’s no Google), discovering onion services is simple, too.
While the Tor browser is needed to access onion services, it can also be used to browse the “surface” internet.Īccessing the Tor network is simple. It enables users to browse the internet anonymously by hiding their identity and location. The second is Tor’s privacy-maximising browser. These sites require an onion address and their servers’ physical locations are hidden from users. These are the websites, or “onion services”, hosted on the Tor network. Tor is an overlay network that exists “on top” of the internet and merges two technologies. The Tor Project’s developers have acknowledged the potential to misuse the service which, when combined with technologies such as untraceable cryptocurrency, can help hide criminals.
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The Tor Project was initially developed by the US Navy to protect online intelligence communications, before its code was publicly released in 2002.
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