Tor’s executive director Roger Dingledine also stressed that hidden services websites only account for 2% of total traffic using Tor’s anonymising technology: a warning not to confuse websites hiding themselves with individual internet users using Tor to surf the web anonymously.ĭingledine added that hidden services do have less worrying applications. Tor has responded to the research by questioning its accuracy, suggesting that the figures may include visits to paedophilia websites from law enforcement and anti-abuse groups, as well as denial of service attacks from hackers trying to take these websites down. Owen also claimed that drug-related sites like Silk Road and Agora accounted for 24% of hidden service sites but 5% of overall traffic, while whistleblower sites like SecureDrop and Globaleaks are 5% of websites but “less than a tenth of a percent” of site visits.
The study found that less than a sixth of hidden services sites that were online in March when the research started were still online in September when it concluded, suggesting a short average lifetime for these websites.
“Before we did this study, it was certainly my view that the dark net is a good thing, but it’s hampering the rights of children and creating a place where paedophiles can act with impunity,” Owen told Wired, while describing the scale of traffic to these sites as “a huge shock”. The latter are not spending 84% of their time visiting child-abuse websites. The study focuses on websites using Tor’s technology to hide themselves, rather than the surfing habits of individual internet users using Tor’s anonymising features. He presented his findings at the Chaos Computer Congress in Germany, with Wired reporting on the research’s conclusion that while sites with paedophile material represent just 2% of the estimated 45,000 hidden services websites online at any one time, they account for 83% of visits to these sites once automated “botnet” traffic is removed from calculations. Researcher Dr Gareth Owen analysed traffic to sites using Tor’s technology to hide their addresses from search engines over a six-month period, in an attempt to understand what kind of sites were most popular.
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