The Dark Net – Epicentre of Cyber Security Threats
Published on : Saturday 09-11-2019
The Dark Net has become the playground for the most dangerous cyber criminals says Utpal Chakraborty.
Knowing the strengths of your enemy before facing it in the battlefield is always an advantage. It will not only help framing your battle strategy but also help you to prepare yourself for the damage it’s going to cause during the battle and the after effects. Exactly the same applies while dealing with cyber security and threats. In this age of cyber warfare the key to victory is building a “Creative Defense Strategy” with latest defence mechanisms using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning rather than relying completely on the conventional ineffective methods.
Historically cyber security, for some reason, has always been ignored or has never been able to take the centre stage for consideration in many enterprises; which it should have been honestly. Many big and small enterprises, government and non-government agencies and even financial institutions has knowingly or unknowingly disregarded it at some point and has paid huge cost and consequences not only on the financial font but also in terms of reputational losses which probably is much severe than any financial losses in today’s business world.
Today, since the head to toe of your enterprise is connected to the external world through internet and the hearts, lungs and kidneys of your enterprise systems are residing on the cloud; you should seriously consider cyber security as one of the prime focus areas for your enterprise. And even as an individual or an ordinary citizen, the time has arrived that we all should understand the importance of cyber security and aware of the threats are being primarily originating from.
Although cyber criminals can operate from any part of the world and can belong to any blacklisted or whitelisted countries, the fact is, majority of the devastating cyber-attacks that happened in the past are well organised, well researched, well strategised and well conducted originating from a single epicentre. And astonishingly, the masterminds of most of those attacks in the past had been executed from a strange world just next to you, called ‘The Dark Net’, which many of you probably are not even aware of.
Physically and digitally the ‘Dark Net’, sometimes referred as ‘Dark Web’, is located deep underneath the ‘Deep Web’, which is essentially not indexed by any of the search engines like the popular Google, Bing, Yahoo search, etc. Okay, let me take a step back and explain what is ‘Surface Web’, ‘Deep Web’ and the ‘Dark Web’, for the benefit of those readers who are probably scratching their heads. If you consider the entire internet as an iceberg, only the tip of which is above the surface of the water, which is just about 10% of the entire iceberg, that is the ‘Surface Web’. Your search engine operates only within this tiny area to which we the common people have access into. The rest 90% under the water comes under ‘Deep Web’, which is not accessible to your search engines and contains humongous amount of data and information from different government and non-government agencies, enterprises, military data, data from research agencies, academia and universities, etc. Arguably a small portion of this ‘Deep Web’, probably around 5%, lies very deep down at the extreme bottom of the iceberg, and is the ‘Dark Web’ where all these criminal masterminds — hackers, killers, mafias, drugs dealers, terrorists, etc., operate from.
These groups of people with a very different ideology and social mental orientation from the mainstream call themselves ‘Crypto Anarchists’, is a form of cyber-spatial realisation of anarchism. They safeguard the boundary of their Dark World with as tight as a crypto wall that your normal browser cannot penetrate into. But apart from this physical boundary there is also a thick boundary of ideology and beliefs which distinguish the Crypto Anarchists from the rest of the mainstream world.
Dark Net is not just a different place in the internet, rather the foundation of the Dark Net is established on a different ideology, thought process and different personalities that operate in it all together. Although these anarchists are considered as criminals by the governments of different countries but they don’t consider themselves against the humanity. They claim that “for the real growth of humanity, there should always be a tough competition of good and bad minds and thus humanity can reach its real excellence”. They also believe privacy and anonymity is fundamental to humans because it allows free human action according to their own will.
Eternally humans are made to use their own brain and mind and make their own decisions. It could be good or bad; they choose it and deal with their own consequences. These Crypto Anarchists strongly believe that if the human mind has to develop under the pressure of strict regulations and guidelines, it will squeeze or suppress the human ability, development and the human evolution. In short ‘Free Human Action’ is what these anarchists advocate. But their definition of ‘Free Human Action’ is probably autocratic which does not hold good for a healthy society or a nation or even for the whole world.
The idea of the Crypto Anarchy was to run a parallel system, a parallel economy and a parallel world which is completely in contrast to the mainstream world with anonymity, absolute privacy and unrestricted human actions constituting dark-minded individuals. But soon this turned into a big marketplace and operating ground for all types of criminal activities. The actual darker side of the Dark Net, the notoriety for which it’s known for, is just as close to Hell. Sorry for using such harsh words but honestly I didn’t find anything better. Soon it has become the marketplace for all types of illegal accts – arms and ammunition, illegal drugs, illegitimate items like stolen credit cards, passports, visas, fake green cards, driving licenses, etc. Characterised by hackers for hire, professional killers for hire, political activists for hire and even extremists from different parts of the world, they all operate from the Dark Net. But the most worrying fact is, it has become the playground for the most dangerous cyber criminals, which we all should be aware from our cyber security and safety point of view. Cyber crime today is an organised crime and a huge business outcome associated with it for the criminals and probably the most terrifying threat to humanity in future after the nuclear warfare. So knowing the threat, its probable magnitude and assessing your security systems that are supposed to combat such threats, will always give you an upper hand.
Utpal Chakraborty is Head of Artificial Intelligence at YES Bank. He is an eminent Data Scientist, AI researcher and Strategist, having 21 years of industry experience, including working as Principal Architect in L&T Infotech, IBM, Capgemini and other MNCs in his past assignments.