4/5 of “Dark Net” Traffic Is to Child Abuse Portals

According to a study of Tor “hidden services” portals, over 80% of the “dark net” online traffic comes from sites that offer child-abuse content. For over 6 months, the researchers have analyzed traffic to websites through Tor’s technology, which is normally used to hide their addresses from search engines.

According to the findings, while sites with pedophile content make up only 2% of the estimated 45,000 hidden services websites on the Internet, they account for 83% of visits without considering automated “botnet” traffic. The research focuses on online portals that used Tor’s technology to hide themselves, not on the online behavior of individual Internet users who use Tor, as they don’t spend 84% of their time visiting child-abuse services.

It turned out that less than 1/6 of hidden services websites have been online for all six months of the study, which shows a short average lifetime for such online services. In the meantime, drug-related websites like Silk Road and Agora made up almost a quarter of the hidden service websites but 5% of overall traffic. As for whistleblower websites like SecureDrop and Globaleaks, they made up 5% of websites but less than 0.1% of website visits.

In response, Tor questioned the accuracy of the findings of the study, pointing out that the results may include visits to pedophilia sites from law enforcement and anti-abuse groups, along with DDoS attacks from hackers. Tor also emphasized that hidden services websites only account for 2% of total traffic with Tor’s anonymizing technology. In other words, you should not confuse websites hiding themselves with individual users who use Tor to surf the Internet anonymously.

One should admit that there are important uses for hidden services – for example, when human rights activists use them to visit Facebook or to blog anonymously. Some also suggest that the habits of people searching for child-abuse content on the Internet may also be a factor.

So, the findings of this recent research bring up new questions for Tor about how it could try to shut down the abusive websites and track their owners. The researchers have pointed out that Tor might be able to block access to such illegal services, but it is unknown whether Tor operators would bother doing this.