According to the most recent survey on the use of technologies that enable access to the Dark and Deep Web, India had the highest percentage of users at 26%. Russia was second, with 22% of local netizens saying they have used tools like Tor to access the Deep Web. Brazil (21%), Indonesia (20%), Turkey (16%), South Africa (16%), and Sweden (16%) all made the top five. At 10%, the US ranked 11th — the same as Australia, Hong Kong, Germany, and Japan. Looking at the Dark Web numbers provided by Tor, the anonymous browser had approximately 2.34 million daily users during this period connecting from German IP addresses. Americans ranked second, accounting for 593,761 (13.33%) of Tor’s direct daily users.
The top three sources for Darkweb research based on the number of citations (TC) are the International Journal of Drug Policy, Forensic Science International, and Addiction. These sources are all journals and have the highest TC/TP (citations per paper) ratios in the table, with the International Journal of Drug Policy having a TC/TP of 38.3 and Forensic Science International having a TC/TP of 32.3. Using the principles of a quadrant chart, we visualize the research productivity (TP) and Influence (TC) of Darkweb from different countries in four quadrants (Fig. 3).
Tor Browser: Accessing The Darknet
Freshtools was established in 2019 and offers various stolen credentials, accounts, and host protocols like RDP. It is considered a go-to site for malware purchasing, providing keyloggers, trojans, and other Malware as a Service products. It has built a reputation for being a reliable source of stolen credit card data and PII.
Alphabay Expands
A private blockchain can create a secure and transparent record of transactions within a closed network, such as a network of farms or agricultural supply chain partners. The top keywords in this cluster, themed Network Security, Malware, and Cyber-attacks, are shown in Table 6. This cluster exemplifies the usefulness of probing Darknets in their ability to serve as network telescope and cyber intelligence tools while offering benefits to studying large-scale attacks’ evolution. The human behavior of seeking anonymity and engaging in criminal activities on the Darkweb fuels security threats.
Deep Dive Into Darknet Markets Of 2025
It attracts RaaS affiliates and credential sellers, leveraging a partners program to expand its reach. The New York Times hosts its content on the dark web too, making it possible to access their articles anonymously, especially in places where the site is censored. In this way, readers across the world can still get their news without any roadblocks.
StartPage – User-Friendly Dark Web Search Engine Like Google
- The co-occurrence network is also structured and connected by its related betweenness and closeness among clusters.
- Below is a curated list of the most active and dangerous dark web forums, each with its own specialties and threat landscape.
- The Darkweb is often used as a platform for the illegal drug trade, which can negatively impact public health, such as increasing the availability of harmful substances, substance abuse, and overdose.
- Verify links, use 2FA (e.g., Incognito), and never reuse passwords—phishing hit 20% of users in 2024.
- This section offers an extensive set of pro-level trading tips for our top 10 darknet rankings, designed to help both novices and veterans maximize safety, efficiency, and success as of February 27, 2025.
The design packs tools like sharp filters (category, price, rating), live seller stats (4.7/5 from 45,000+ reviews), and a multi-step check system that keeps sellers legit, holding scams below 2%. Abacus leans hard on its payment protection system, hitting a 98% success rate—one of the best we’ve tracked—keeping deals smooth between its 15,000+ users and 1,200+ sellers with few hiccups. Ninety percent get sorted within 36 hours, thanks to a focused moderation crew and a clear process that puts user confidence first.
We repeated the process three times, assigning each annotator a new batch of approximately 23 domains every time. Thus, each onion domain was judged three times by three different annotators, and as a result, each domain was represented by three binary vectors of answers. Following the majority voting approach, we unified these answers’ vectors of every domain into a single vector of 23 dimensions that corresponded with the number of questions. Finally, we summed the answers of each domain to obtain a score value for each domain, representing a ground-truth rank while training.
Top 8 Darknet Marketplaces: Trends Of Darkweb Ecosystem
Its Tor routing holds a 97% uptime, with rare breaks tied to scaling up, not attacks. Currency use shows its wide appeal—BTC runs 65% of trades for speed and ease, while XMR’s privacy jumped to 35% in 2025 from 25% in 2024, boosted by a 20% rise in privacy-focused users since late 2024. Incognito stands out with its security-first mindset—mandatory 2FA, added after a 2023 phishing scare, cut account breaches by 80%, winning over privacy-minded traders. Sellers like “DarkMedic” and “GhostCode” hold 98% ratings, delivering solid drugs and digital goods with 94% shipping reliability. Its 20,000+ listings lag behind Alphabay’s 60,000, but the focus on safety and quality keeps it tight, with scams below 1%. The $2.8M monthly trade volume trails bigger players, but its 5% share shows a loyal base that values security over size.
In this guide, we’ll break down the top dark web markets and how to stay safe while using them. The darknet is a dynamic space where innovation and resilience collide—new features like 2FA and USDT support signal a maturing ecosystem, while vendor growth and encryption upgrades counter rising threats. These updates, sourced from platform announcements, user reports, and darknet forums, highlight the operational agility of our top 10 markets, which collectively process over $50 million monthly. Whether you’re tracking Abacus’s dominance, Drughub’s niche focus, or Bohemia’s stability, this news feed offers actionable insights into the evolving world of darknet rankings, helping you make informed trading decisions in 2025. Supporting BTC (60%) and XMR (40%), Torrez’s interface offers advanced filters and fast trades—90% complete within minutes—keeping prices 5–10% below premium markets. Vendors like “TorrezRx” and “HackElite” boast 98% ratings, with 94% shipping reliability.
Hidden Cyber Risks Of Generative Artificial Intelligence
In our study, we created a co-citation map to uncover the linkages between SDG as measured through citations. The proximity between SDGs indicates how similar they are in co-citation frequency, meaning that publications from two SDGs are often cited together in the same set of publications. The nodes’ size represents the SDG frequency in terms of total publications, and the thickness of the edges represents the frequency of co-citation between SDG. Based on the keywords in this cluster, as seen in Table 5, the theme of Cluster 2 is Cybercrime, Data Privacy, and Cryptography and is closely connected to the illicit drug trade on the Darknet. Cybercrime tools and techniques, like using encrypted communication channels and anonymous online identities, are commonly employed by drug traffickers to protect their identities and evade detection.
Abacus Upgrades
Through the dark web, users in places of high censorship can also access information and news. To make its journalism more accessible to readers around the world, the New York Times launched its onion service in 2017. You won’t find any “hidden” stories here—it’s the same content as the normal web edition—but users in countries with government censorship will appreciate having a secure way to access it. Onion sites (aka Tor sites) are websites only accessible on the dark web; you can’t view them using a regular browser. Their URLs (aka dark web links) have .onion as the domain, instead of the common surface web domains like .com or .net.
Direct Successors
This was the price of a hacked account on the peer-to-peer exchange LocalBitcoins, which has since shut down. Unsurprisingly, facts about the Dark Web show that accounts on the more popular exchanges had higher asking prices. They ranged from $85 for a Blockchain.com account to $300 for a Crypto.com account to $1,170 for a Kraken account. Hacked and verified Wirex and N26 accounts commanded the highest prices — $2,300 and $2,650, respectively. Learn how to automate financial risk reports using AI and news data with this guide for product managers, featuring tools from Webz.io and OpenAI. ASAP integrates USDT, cutting trade costs by 20%—a rising trend in crypto commerce.
Because of the range of goods and services found for sale and the conversations that occur around these sales, dark web marketplaces can be precious sources of data on criminal activity. As such, they are normally under intense scrutiny from law enforcement and security professionals alike. The second module, which is the focus of this study, addresses the problem of ranking the HS that were classified as suspicious. Once they are ranked, a police officer can prioritize the work by focusing on the most influential onion domains. In our previous work 2, we presented ToRank, a ranking algorithm to sort onion domains by analysing the connectivity of their hyperlinks, a linked-based approach.
