The Internet Underground

The book I read to research this post was The beginners Guide To The Internet Underground by Jeremy Martin which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. This book encompasses all the dark side of the internet like the darknet, hacking and internet anonymity in general. There is a legitimate side to all this in that people living in oppressive regimes might want to hide their internet activity and might want unbiased news. There is something called the onion ring or tor browser that helps keep you anonymous and can be found at thetorproject.org. There are also live operating systems that run from a cd and don't leave any trace even on the local hard drive. Two of these are Whoix & Tail OS. On the daker side you can find almost anything imagineable on the darknet sites even assassination services that can be purchased with anonymous bit coins and the author does recommend reporting anything dodgy you come across even if only to keep yourself out of trouble with law enforcement. Probably the most well known darknet storefront is at The Silk Road at http://silkroad6ownowfk.onion. This has cleaned up its act a bit recently to avoid being shut so there are much dodgier sites. There is a website at www.portableapps.com that lets you set up your own darknet storefront. I've only included this stuff for information purposes and there are far more sites in the book. Many of the darknet sites use the onion extension and of course they aren't indexed by Google etc. I think these kind of books are worth reading if only to keep you safe from things like identity theft on the internet. It does go into hacking and how practically every political or terrorist group has its own hackers. Sometimes hackers just leave a message on websites saying you need to upgrade your security and other times of course it's a lot more sinister. Nobody knows how much money is lost through companies being hacked and often they are reluctant to report it for fear of bad publicity. I really enjoyed reading this book and found it really interesting.