The real magnitude of shady dealings happening under the cover of anonymity offered by darknet, known as the underworld of Internet, is yet to be fully ascertained by enforcement agencies, said Sandeep Sharma of the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), a technical intelligence agency under the National Security Advisor.
Participating in COCON, the annual cyber security and hacking conference that got under way here on Friday, Mr. Sharma said the depths of darknet remained to be explored.
“What we see in the open in the Internet is just 10%, while 90% remains in the deep web, out of which 10% continues in the darknet. The challenge posed by darknet is worrying for all enforcement agencies,” he observed.
While all sorts of illegal dealings are happening in darknet, it is not possible to quantify the loss caused by it. The anonymity offered by darknet is enormous, and communication remains restricted to the parties concerned. With payments too being made in bitcoins, the danger of being exposed is that much minimum, he said.
Work is on to tackle challenges posed by darknet at various levels. Mr. Sharma hailed efforts made by Cyberdome, a premier facility of the Kerala Police dedicated to prevent cybercrimes and mitigate security threats to the State’s critical information infrastructure, to explore darknet and the significance attached to the topic at COCON.
Maintaining that a national cyber strategy is being evolved to ensure the security of cyberspace, Mr. Sharma said NTRO was on constant alert. The National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre under NTRO has been entrusted with the protection of all critical information infrastructure.
