West Michigan's Morning News
What is the Dark Web?
Well it's more than just a reference in a crime novel, the dark web is real. This is West Michigan's morning news. Steve Kelly and Brett Bakeda Schmidi back in the next half hour. Morgan Wright is on the live line with us. Cyber terrorism analysts spent some time in the the US State Department. Now is the chief security advisor at Sentinel-1. Morgan thanks for doing this again today. Hey you bet guys my pleasure. So what kind of stuff is out there right? I mean it's not something that you want to do a Google search on. Now and you can't actually there's three webs out there. There's the open web which we all have access to go to a search tool type it in. Then there's the deep web. Things behind paywalls or things inside companies which actually that's where probably the most information is. Then you get to the dark web. So the dark web requires a special tool to get on there. It used to be very tough to get on there but here's your trivia back for the morning. Other than Al Gore who invented the Internet, who invented the dark web? I don't know but I'm dying to find out. The US Navy back in the mid 90s they needed a secure way for naval intelligence to communicate and it was the Naval Research Lab that came up with the design. They released it in 2000 about 2003. This is what we now know is the dark web. You get to it through the onion routing browser, a tour browser, things that allow you to like in your sites like you go to your your news radio site it will end in dot com. These sites end in dot onion and that's where you'll see ransomware demands happen. You can actually buy drugs, false documents. I mean there's a variety of things on the on the dark web that are available today that would not be available on traditional sites because they would get taken down very quickly. When did it go rogue? When did it go from a useful part of the US Navy intelligence to what it is now? Well this is the other neat tie in that the the dark web was just kind of a you know it was a communication tool and it was kind of a you know little gadget or trinket over there in the corner until 2009 the introduction of Bitcoin. Once you introduced Bitcoin and you could conduct transactions anonymously that fueled the rise of things like Pirates Bay, the Silk Road, things like that that this and this is where you got into serious stuff. This is where you could buy all sorts of weapons that were prohibited. You could hire contract killers, you could buy false documents. There were so many things that the introduction of Bitcoin and the use of cryptocurrency enabled that's what fueled the rise of the dark web. It was puttering along a little bit but once you introduced the economics into it once you introduced a payment method that was anonymous the same way the dark web was. That's what fueled the rise of it starting back at about 2009. Morgan how are we doing monitoring and how smart as a country defensively are we against this thing? You know it's it's it's it's a tough thing because I did a presentation here a couple years ago where I showed I went and found some tools where you could map out the dark web and people far smarter than me did it. It's very difficult to because these things change all the time so it's like your website's been up for a long time. I can go back into the archives and see stuff you know but this stuff these things change all the time so from an investigative standpoint it's very difficult to defeat the technology what you have to do like they did with Silk Road is you end up getting an email address or something where they they broke their own operational security so from an investigative standpoint it is extremely difficult to do things like this. And it's good to know I guess if you have maybe a smart kid who's got a pensions to get himself in trouble not anybody can just get involved and then and again I watch way too much stuff on Netflix and that's the only reference that I have for this stuff right? Well that's the combination if you've got access if you've seen anybody using the Tor browser and they've got access to Bitcoin those are the two ingredients those are the two precursors you need to make trouble so those if your parents out there and if you're looking you know actually quite frankly the dark web for teenagers isn't probably the issue because you can get so much stuff we've seen it happen with fentanyl and illegal stuff you get on Snapchat Instagram you know there's so much of that is available out there but the real serious stuff in fact the ability to get false documents to get drugs and like I say higher contract killers a hitman that stuff still exists out there on the dark web but from an investigative standpoint we know cartels are using it we know terrorist groups are using it so from a national security standpoint it becomes extremely important that we figure out how to do this but we're still very challenged today well used to work for the State Department now the chief security officer it's Sentinel-1 Morgan Wright thanks for your time this morning you bet guys