Everything about Dark Web the hidden iceberg.

Dark Web

Many of you must have heard this Deep Web or Dark Web or Dark Net and many may not have heard. Dark web is a hidden network from the internet we see on day to day basis. No traditional search engines (Chrome, Mozilla, IE, etc.) will be able to find or locate the dark web because, those information are not indexed by search engines. Specific software, search engine optimization and configurations were made behind. 

This black market deals mostly on pirated software, illegal arms trafficking. It is also known as black market which is operated online and behind the curtain.

Websites on the dark web use much encryption software to keep their visitors and owners remain anonymous and hide their locations over the network and making it as home to so much illegal activity. If you tap into the dark web, you’ll find everything from illegal drug and gun sales to illicit pornography and stolen credit card, bank account number, banking passwords and Social Security numbers.

As per Norton reports, key event for the dark web came in 2002, when the alpha version of the Tor web browser was launched. This browser, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software that allows people to travel the web anonymously. The development of the Tor Browser that is commonly used today to access the dark web began in 2008. Even if anyone wants to access dark web, its legal. No worries, but yes if you buy items or deal with any matters through dark web, then it becomes illegal.

When you go and browse dark web you can find items in sell such as;

• Stolen credit card numbers
• Firearms
• Pornography
• Sex racket
• Stolen gold and jewelry
• Stolen Social Security numbers
• Marijuana
• Guns 
• Costly apparels
• Fake passports

The deep web is little bit safer than the dark web. Accessing the contents are also safe. Deep web is little bit different than dark web, in deep web you can find stored information on below items;

• The content of your personal email accounts
• Your social media account contents
• Your online banking contents
• Private database of companies and corporate
• Medical records
• Legal documents

How to access dark web

Accessing to dark web is not a difficult task, all you need some search engine and some browser to access. The most popular one is TOR browser, you can not access using chrome or Mozilla. People use this browser to become anonymous while browsing. But there is some tricky methods to find the dark web sites through the TOR. Again remember it is not safe always to browse dark web contents, you might require one VPN connectivity for adding more safe to your browsing. Never share any personal information in dark web.

If you have further suggestions, please feel free to provide below.

-DR

Basics of HTML

HTML 

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the basic building block of the web. It provides the structure, content and connection between pages, allowing web designers to create interactive experiences and many opportunities. The mass of web pages are made up of one or more files that are downloaded to a computer, which in turn are interpreted by a web browser and finally rendered out to our computer screen. HTML is a markup-based, human-readable language that’s intended to be simple to write, and easy to understand.

Behind all HTML consists of identifiers (markups) that refer to various segments of the file such as the header, body and footer, the divisions inside these with images, forms that could be downloaded and printed, calendars with events marked, etc

The HTML was initially developed in 1993 as a HTML version 1.0. This 1.0 was a basic version and was supporting to basic elements like text controls and images. In 1995 HTML 2.0 developed for improving with text boxes, buttons, forms, tags etc. Then HTML 3.2 in 1997, HTML 4.01 in 1999 and finally HTML 5 released on 2007. 

The most thrilling aspect of HTML5 is the semantic approach to marking up content. This latest version introduces new features and support for multimedia directly inside an HTML document.

Over the past few years, videos on the web has exploded. As bandwidth has increased, and more people have access to high-speed internet connections. Until HTML5, the most reliable and common method for including video on a web page was to render it using Adobe Flash. Now YouTube came in to rule over all the video playing applications and showing the videos.

Like HTML, the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is another key component for building web pages and without them the web as we know it simply would not exist. HTML provides the building blocks and structure while CSS offers the styling such as it adds style to the front end of a webpage and defines the layout design, style fonts, borders, images, videos and create a background canvas.

HTML 5 came with tags such as <video> tag, <nav> tag, <article> tag.

A Basic example of HTML query

<html>

<head>

<title> Page Title </title>

</head>

<body>

TAG Info:

The HEAD tag

The head tag contains important information for the browser, such as CSS styles as well as search engine information.

The HEADER Tag

The header tag is different than the head tag, as it’s contained within the body of the HTML page, meaning it gets displayed in the browser. The header usually contains company emblem, navigation and possibly an introductory image.

Advantages

• HTML is easy to learn
• HTML is free to use and user friendly
• HTML is supported by all browsers
• HTML is basic for all programming languages and can be integrated with other languages.

For more information you can refer W3C portal. 

-DR

Basics about Hashing in cryptography

Hashing

Hashing is an algorithm used in blockchain technology and other cryptographic controls. It is a process of using an algorithm to map data or to scramble it of any size to a fixed length.

That fixed length string contains of numbers and characters known as hash or hash value.

As told, this hashing algorithm is used more in cryptography for encrypting keys or messages. Encryption is meant to protect data in transit, whereas hashing is meant to protect them at rest, that is to verify or check-sum that data or file is not altered and is authentic. Encryption is a two way function using the public key, whereas hashing is a one way function only, so that the text can not be unscrambled and decoded by anyone. 

Common hashing algorithms are such as MD4, MD5, CRC-32, SHA etc.

MD5: Known as Message Digest 5 and is an one way cryptographic hash algorithm used to verify data integrity.  The MD5 message-digest algorithm is a widely used cryptographic hash function producing a 128-bit (16-byte) hash value, normally expressed as a 32 digit hexadecimal number.

Example of one hash file.

Let I have to add MD5 hash value to the word “Vine”. The output hash file will be as: a77b51765620b8b0c50236e9ea8907ab

Confusing? Yes it can be. Because normal people can not make this combination. We ideally use a HASH generator. There is a MD5 hash generator. This MD5 hash generator is useful for encoding passwords, credit cards numbers and other sensitive date into MySQL, Postgress or other databases. This tool provides a quick and easy way to encode an MD5 hash from a simple string of up to 256 characters in length.

Secure hashing algorithms (SHA) are many types and are published by NIST and NSA. Some of the SHA types are, SHA-0, SHA-1, SHA-2, SHA-3, SHA-256.

SHA-1 is a cryptographic hash algorithm, which generates a 160-bit string value as the hash value. It is commonly used in security and data integrity applications. This hashing algorithm was developed by the National Security Agency (NSA). In case of SHA-256, it creates 256 bit (32 bytes) of string value as the hash value.

Advantages of Hashing

• Hashing provides more reliable and flexible data retrieval method.
• Digital forensic experts use hashing value in case of verifying images and other documents during their investigation.
• Password storing and verification.

  Further you can suggest your views at comment below section.

-DR