Over 80 per cent of anonymous network Tor’s traffic is driven by child abuse sites, new research has found.
According to a research study conducted by Dr Gareth Owen at the University of Portsmouth, more than four out of five visits to dark websites were to online destinations hosting images of child abuse. That’s over five times as many as any of the other categories of content on Dark Web such as gambling, bitcoin-related sites or anonymous whistle-blowing.
The dark web is a section of the internet that is not indexed by search engines and cannot be easily navigated to using a standard web browser.
The six-month research sought to analyze traffic to sites using Tor’s technology to hide their addresses from search engines, to know what kind of sites were most popular.
The research study found that drug-related sites like Silk Road and Agora accounted for around 24 percent of dark websites but 5 percent of overall traffic, while whistleblower sites like SecureDrop and Globaleaks are 5 percent of such hidden service websites but “less than a tenth of a percent” of visits.
“Before we did this study, it was certainly my view that the dark net is a good thing,” Owen said.
“But it’s hampering the rights of children and creating a place where pedophiles can act with impunity.”
Responding to the research, Tor questioned on the accuracy of the data, suggesting that the figures may include visits to paedophilia websites by law enforcement and anti-abuse groups, who monitor pedophilia dark web sites, as well as denial of service attacks from hackers trying to take these websites down.
Tor’s executive director Roger Dingledine said the methodology of the study – which only scanned long-lived sites to check the content offered – made it hard to draw conclusions about what people did on the network.
“Without knowing how many sites disappeared before he got around to looking at them, it’s impossible to know what percentage of fetches went to abuse sites,” Dingledine said.
“There are important uses for hidden services, such as when human rights activists use them to access Facebook or to blog anonymously,” he added.
The findings were presented at the Chaos Computer Congress in Germany on Tuesday.
