Mystery in the DarkNet: four main trafficking channels simply disappeared

Whoever ventures into the underworld of the dark web knows that a lot happens there, but the disappearance of drug trafficking sites is a mystery.

This past Friday (13), four of the largest sites used for drug trafficking in the dark web mysteriously disappeared. They are Tochka, The Trade Route, Dream Market and Wall Street Market. According to DeepDotWeb, a visitor tracker, there was a major drop in hits and this occurred without any warning.

Of course, the '' clients '' of this site soon realized and now are suspecting the most diverse reasons. One of the most likely causes would be an immense police operation that would have carried out a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack to knock down the servers and end the crime in the #Dark Web.

It is worth remembering that last July the Dutch National Police teamed up with the FBI and the National Agency for Combating American Drugs and succeeded in overthrowing Hansa and Alphabay, who were two of the largest drug trafficking networks in the country. 

However, this time no authority has taken on any kind of operation and the mystery continues, but they are attentive to everything that is happening because this mystery one hour will end and everyone wants to know the reason. After all, it was not just one but four great sites that fell at the same time.

The dark web requires special tools for navigation since it guarantees anonymity to Internet users and it is precisely for this reason that the traffickers use it for the sale of drugs. DDoS is when a site is bombarded by a large number of hits and the server gets so overloaded that it ends up crashing and the page is unavailable. Imagine a large number of cars on an avenue and more vehicles are coming. There are so many cars that no one can move.

The DDoS attack works something like this and is usually promoted by hackers, but authorities in several countries are using this tactic against sites that operate illegally. The dark web does not appear in the common search tools. So it's no use searching on Google and you need specific tools to access the sites on this network.

Most sites available on the dark web have URLs consisting of letters and numbers, with the .onion domain. These sites are not found by search engines and are not accessed by traditional browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and others. 

It is necessary to have the Tor Browser to navigate in this network and the curious thing is that this navigator was developed by the Agency of American Naval Intelligence, which made the project open to all, allowing that it was possible to navigate anonymously because the browser encrypts the user IP.