When the general public hears about the dark web, it is often through articles or reports presenting a diabolical network, with the emphasis on child sexual abuse material, the sale of weapons and drugs, or the activities of hackers.
That content is certainly real, but it is not the whole of what can be found on the dark web. It is worth saying here that, while the dark web is a space without censorship, not every site on the Tor network is malicious, dangerous or shocking. There is no anti-benevolence filter on the dark web.
So the network hosts sites that serve the common good, as well as sites whose reason for existing is rather less clear — sites that are eccentric, unusual, or entirely at odds with the picture people have of the dark web.
1 – Mystery Boxes
Of the sites covered in this article, Mystery Boxes are the only ones with a commercial purpose. The principle is to sell parcels of objects whose contents are not described explicitly but are supposed to inspire dread.
Home page of the Mistery Box site (sic)
Home page of the Mistery Box site (sic) and its most expensive mystery parcel.
One might think there is no market for this. Who, after all, would spend more than $850 on a parcel with unidentified contents? That reckons without certain clear web content creators — YouTubers in particular — who happily order this kind of product and then film themselves opening the parcel. YouTube carries some deeply cynical videos in which influencers discover the contents of their ‘terrible package’ with feigned emotion and a great deal of crude effect.
In one of these videos, it is clear that the traumatic character of the parcel’s contents rests far more on autosuggestion than on the contents themselves: a book on medicine, a Christmas decoration, children’s shoes, a case containing surgical instruments, a meat grinder and a box containing teeth.
What we are watching is a perfect symbiosis between dark web jokers and YouTubers: while advertising this type of product, the YouTubers secure themselves an audience hungry for sensation.
What looks like nothing more than a vast dark web hoax is thus fed by unscrupulous content creators.
The contents of the mystery parcel
2 – Animal sites
Far from the supposedly macabre side of Mystery Boxes, the Tor network has sites devoted to pets. The now defunct Scottish Pups site offered photos of Scottish Terrier puppies.
One Russian-language site contains nothing but two magnificent photos of cats, with the comment ‘There is nothing here but cats. And there are a lot of them.’
Three sites apparently created by the same person in August 2019 each take an interest in one particular pet: Frank The Snake, Channel Chirp and Pepper The Dog. Here again the content amounts to a few entirely innocent photos.
Frank The Snake
Channel Chirp
Pepper the Dog
These three sites, still active today, contain nothing but photos and a few lines of text; they are not a front for any malicious venture.
3 – Genuine pranksters
Sometimes the playfulness of a site is more obvious. Paying tribute to the tradition of rickrolling, a site created in July 2017 — whose domain name began with ‘hacker’, and which therefore promised content of a certain kind — in fact contained nothing but the video for Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.
Rickrolled again
In the same spirit, the site Baf’s Recipe World appears to offer cookery recipes, some of them with fairly original names.
Baf’s Recipe World
There is in fact no recipe as such on the site, since every link leads to… the FBI’s site.
Law enforcement can also fall victim to ill-intentioned jokers. An American team specialising in the fight against cybercrime created a site on the Tor network in May 2021 to display its record of arrests.
In February 2022 we saw a fraudulent mirror of that site appear, whose distinguishing feature was an advertising banner at the foot of the page for a child sexual abuse site (Paradise Princesses); the banner in fact redirects to another site for exchanging child sexual abuse material, The Exchange.
Fraudulent mirror of the NCIDE task force site
4 – The unexpected
Finally, we sometimes come across sites whose presence on the Tor network seems incongruous given how entirely innocuous they are. What interest could a water-skiing club on Lake Serre-Ponçon possibly have in a dark web site? And yet it had one a few years ago. In the same vein, the French-language dark web has held a few surprises of the same kind for us.
In May 2017 we noted the appearance of a site devoted to Avallon station (in the Yonne département) and Lormes station (in the Nièvre). The site, which disappeared in October 2021, contained documents on the two stations along with photos of model locomotives.
The Avallon model train
Our data collection tool also captured for posterity the very brief existence (January to February 2018) of the onion site of the Ivorian Motor Sport Federation (FISA).
Home page of the FISA site
We went through all the indexed content of these sites and, here again, found no trace of hidden activity. It is therefore established that these sites claim no function other than the one they state — much like what appears to be the tourist office site of Clausnitz, a village in the German state of Saxony.
Clausnitz Im Erzgebirge
The links on that page lead to clear web sites and are in no way suspect. So the question comes up again: what is the point of this presence on the dark web? One hypothesis would be the technical challenge. The webmaster of each of these sites may have had the idea of trying to create an onion version of their clear web site, for the sheer pleasure of doing it.
Finally, to that question ‘why’ we can also answer ‘why not?’. As we said at the outset, the dark web is not a place reserved for the doings of disreputable individuals; it is simply a place whose purpose is to guarantee a certain level of anonymity, without presuming anything about its users’ intentions. It therefore seemed worth recalling the diversity of what can be found on a network too often caricatured in poorly informed publications.