Hopefully it will demystify things a bit. We spoke to some security pros who offered to give us a bit of a guided tour of the web's nether regions.

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That's not to say that scary stuff isn't available on dark web websites, but some of the whispered horror stories you might've heard don't make up the bulk of the transactions there. But like most legends, the reality is a bit more pedestrian.

The so-called dark web, a catch-all phrase covering the parts of the internet not indexed by search engines, is the stuff of grim legend. But as ARPANET became the internet and then swallowed up nearly all the other computer networks out there, the word came to identify areas that were connected to the internet but not quite of it, difficult to find if you didn't have a map. Back in the 1970s, 'darknet' wasn't an ominous term: it simply referred to networks that were isolated from the mainstream of ARPANET for security purposes.

Dark web browser online