A mysterious coded letter penned in the 17th century by a nun who claimed to be possessed by the Devil himself has finally been deciphered using an algorithm found, oddly enough, on the Dark Web.

The dark web showcases the worst parts of the internet - but it also shows us it’s possible to browse without giving up our privacy

The man who beat the FBI to identify the mastermind of global online drugs market Silk Road.

A couple of weeks ago, AlphaBay and Hansa, two of the most popular dark web marketplaces were busted and seized by European law enforcement authorities. It can be expected that sooner or later the identified buyers will be caught since Netherlands police have arrested a number of vendors or buyers who used the same password on Hansa and AlphaBay.

It's just as shady and dangerous as ever, but something has changed in the way the dark web does business, and it will look very familiar to IT buyers.

But law enforcement's raid on AlphaBay won't end the darknet's vibrant drug trade.

Rather than share the now-classified technological means that investigators used to locate a child porn suspect, federal prosecutors in Washington state have dropped all charges against a man accused of accessing Playpen, a notorious and now-shuttered website. The case, United States v. Jay Michaud, is one of nearly 200 cases nationwide that have raised new questions about the appropriate limitations on the government’s ability to hack criminal suspects. Michaud marks just the second time that prosecutors have asked that case be dismissed.

A pro-Islamic State hacking group operating on the dark web has called on Muslims in the U.S. and Europe to launch attacks in their own countries. The ‘cyber Kahilafah’ group issued a message addressing so-called ‘lone wolves’ operating in “Europe, America and Gulf States involved in the coalition fighting the Islamic State.”

Wildlife traders attempting to use the dark web to illegally flog rare and exotic animals are getting flamed by other users, a privacy expert has told Motherboard. Joss Wright, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, said that during his research on wildlife trade in anonymous marketplaces, he found that traders suggesting sales of live animals are usually met with “vitriol.”

The drug trade is moving from the street to online cryptomarkets. Forced to compete on price and quality, sellers are upping their game. Leavingvacuum-sealed bags, digital scales and stashes of marijuana lying around was a mistake. So was getting T-shirts and hoodies emblazoned with “Cali Connect”, under which name drugs were dealt online. Selling pot to an undercover officer was a further slip-up. All this is part of the prosecution evidence in an ongoing case against David Burchard in California.

2015 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS) The Domain Name System (DNS) provides the critical service of mapping canonical names to IP addresses. Recognizing this, a number of parties have increasingly attempted to perform “domain seizures” on targets by having them delisted from DNS. Such operations often occur without providing due process to the owners of these domains, a practice made potentially worse by recent legislative proposals. ...

I2P is an open source Internet technology that makes it possible to use and provide Internet services anonymously. It does so by creating a hidden network within the Internet, a Darknet. This report looks into the history and development of the software, the way I2P works and provides a short developers guide for setting up a website within the I2P network. Next to that, some applications of I2P are covered, including anonymous emailing, web hosting and file sharing. ...

In April 2015, BitTorrent Inc. released their distributed peer-to-peer powered browser, Project Maelstrom, into public beta. The browser facilitates a new alternative website distribution paradigm to the traditional HTTP-based, client-server model. This decentralised web is powered by each of the visitors accessing each Maelstrom hosted website. Each user shares their copy of the website;s source code and multimedia content with new visitors...

On July 15th in Pittsburgh, David J. Hickton, a gray-haired U.S. attorney in a crisp dark suit, stepped out before an American flag to announce the feds' latest victory against online crime. "We have dismantled a cyber-hornet's nest of criminal hackers, which was believed by many to be impenetrable," he said. "We are in the process of rounding up and charging the hornets." By the next morning, more than 70 people across the world had been charged, arrested or searched...

We present HORNET, a system that enables high-speed end-to-end anonymous channels by leveraging next generation network architectures. HORNET is designed as a low-latency onion routing system that operates at the network layer thus enabling a wide range of applications. Our system uses only symmetric cryptography for data forwarding yet requires no per-flow state on intermediate nodes. This design enables HORNET nodes to process anonymous traffic at over 93 Gb/s ...

My wife Jackie has severe asthma. Thanks to the ridiculous state of health care in the United States, I was recently forced to commit a crime in order to get her the medicine she needs to live.