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. 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.
Naturally, unsettling content and activity flourished in the shadows. “You can find pretty much anything you can think of in the darknet,” says Loucif Kharouni, Senior Threat Researcher at big data security firm Damballa.
