To begin, I think I should explain to some readers the difference between the Deep Web and the Dark Web. The Deep Web was a place that was accessible online by the use of special web browsers such as Tor that contains less than legal things such as drugs, human trafficking, and hitmen for hire. The Dark Web was pretty much everything that was no longer available by conventional means, such as military websites and other sites that have not been incorporated into the current internet architecture. With that in mind, I would like to convey to you all my story of my (accidental) journey into the unknown space known as the Dark Web.
I'm a computer technician by profession. I worked for a company that was contracted by local businesses and private consumers to set up internet connections, install software, and repair any sort of computer problems they can come up with. So, naturally, I got all the crazy stories and problems that these people could come up with. I swear, some of these people just don't know how to work a computer, even in this day-and-age. Anyway, one day I got a call from a local business complaining that their internet was acting up and that they "must have a virus". So I shook my head, thinking that someone must have unplugged a network cable or downloaded a Trojan horse accidentally, got up and drove over to the business to address the problem.
As soon as I arrived, the man who called me immediately spotted me and started going on and on about hackers and how much he hated Microsoft Windows and how many viruses it created and all that nonsense that I usually received when addressing business problems. He led me to his computer and I pulled out my laptop and sat down in front of it and began to work. He told me "good luck" and walked away to go do whatever it was he did in his downtime.
I opened up the browser he used (no surprise) and it opened to "about:blank" (it didn't even have a home page?). So, I tried connecting to "google.com", 404 error. Well, I know that "google.com" definitely existed so there was a problem with his internet connection. I opened his network and Sharing Center to see if I could use the built-in troubleshooter to diagnose the problem, but I gave myself a well-deserved facepalm when I saw that he wasn't connected to any network at all. So I searched for networks and found a few wireless connections for him to connect to. They're all WEP encrypted and I was almost positive that he didn't know the key, so I broke out my laptop and ran a WEP cracking tool to get his computer up and running again.
As I was waiting for my tool to find the WEP key, another network suddenly showed up on my computer, this one unprotected with an SSID consisting of a random hexadecimal string. Now, I was extremely bored waiting for this guy to return, so I decided to connect to it and take a little look around to see where it was coming from. I connected without problems and opened up my toolkit of cracking tools to see if I could find a source for this connection. As I was having my fun, hacking away at this unprotected network, my computer froze up, albeit only for a second or two, but this didn't happen much and it caught me by surprise. I shrugged it off as the poor internet speed there and kept on going. A couple minutes later, however, it happened again. And a few minutes after that, once again, each time getting longer and longer. "Weird," I thought to myself, "what's with this network?" It was then that things started getting really interesting.
After the long string of pauses, my screen flickered a little bit and, out of nowhere, my browser opened by itself. Now I was worried that I had somehow infected my computer with some kind of malware by connecting to this network, and I proceeded to close the browser and began to disconnect from the network before anything worse could happen. But I couldn't disconnect. No matter how many times I clicked the little disconnect button, my computer didn't respond, despite everything else on my screen running fine. "Fuck," I thought to myself, "this is gonna be a long day." And just as I was about to hit the power button on my laptop to perform a hard reset, my browser opened again. This time, with a little chat box opened...
