Transcript for:
Safely Accessing the Dark Web

Before you try to access the dark web, let me show you how to do it safely and securely. I'll show you three ways, starting with the most insecure way, the way you're about to try. You're going to get hacked and then I'll end with the most secure way, like you're invisible, that can't touch you. You're Edward Snowden, Snowden level security, kind of a cool name for a company. Actually dips before we go to number one, and I'll let you loose. You got to know the dark web isn't all bad. It was actually created with good intentions to give people anonymity and a platform for free expression, and it has a ton of legitimate uses. So think journalists try to communicate with people who want to stay hidden like Edward Snowden or people trying to keep their activities hidden from their government like Edward Snowden. Or if you want to play chess without anybody watching, yes, you can play chess on the dark web like Edward Snowden. I think he plays chess, right? But seriously, the dark web is kind of a good place with legitimate websites like the New York Times, B B C C I A, Facebook, it's all there ready to be accessed securely and it's awesome. But what makes it awesome also makes it kind of terrifying because it's the perfect breeding ground for all types of illegal activity. I mean, think about it. If you're a criminal, it's perfect anonymity with no oversight. It's like the purge all the time, except in the internet. And by the way, did you know that your stuff is for sale in this place? The dark web, your emails, your passwords, your logins, it's there. Criminals are buying it as we speak. How do I know that you can use what I use to find out and keep myself safe? Dashlane the sponsor of this video built into Dashlane amazing password management is dark web monitoring. They keep an eye on the dark web for me and they tell me if my stuff is hacked. And using Dashlane, I can generate a super secure never before seen password that's not used by any other service and that store that suckers safely inside Dashlane. In fact, I use Dashlane for all my passwords, personal and for my YouTube business. Now I'm a Target and so are my employees. So I force them to use Dashlane and through the management console I can see if their passwords are healthy. Every big hack usually happens with people just kind of messing up, just being human and making a little boo booo here and there. Don't why I I said boo boo, but with Dashlane, I've got my eyes on all the stuff. So if you want to make sure that your stuff isn't on the dark web and that your passwords are secure, check out Dashlane. I got a link below. If you use my Code Network, Chuck 50, you'll get 50% off. And thanks again to Dashlane for sponsoring this video and supporting my channel. Okay, number one on our list and the most insecure way to access the dark web. Seriously, don't do this, but I know some of you are still going to do it. I know all you'll need to do is download something called the Tor browser. Just like you might download Chrome or Firefox to access the regular internet known as the clearnet, you'll download the Tor browser to access the dark web. Now, the Tor browser, which stands for the Onion Router, is what you'll use to access the Onion network. I know you didn't think the dark web would involve so many onions. In fact, it's kind of all onions sitting on top of the internet and the onions are what make it dark. Not that onions are bad, they just have layers. Now, we won't go too deep. We're not onion farming here, but just know that part of what makes it secure and why we need a special browser is that like the layers of an onion data sent on the dark web is sent to three onion routers. I told you there's a ton of onions before they reach their destination, each applying a layer of encryption or security. This helps keep your data anonymous and safe, and there is a lot more magic to it if you do want to become an onion farmer. I've got a video here where I go a lot deeper and I show you how to actually put your own website on the dark web. You can do that. So if you want to imagine the dark web is a little less scary, just imagine a bunch of onions connected together, kind of what it is. Now, watch how easy it is to get on the dark web. I'm going to open my web browser and go out to the tor project.org and then I'll click on download tor browser and download from my operating system. You probably notice iOS missing. I'll show you how to do that here in a bit. I'll run the installer here for Windows, installing it on my desktop. You can choose anywhere you want and click finish. And now to connect to the dark web, all we have to do is click one button. You ready? About to get Real connect? And here we go. It's creating a connection, connecting to three onions. And we're on the dark web. Spooky, huh? Kind of not really, right? We're here. What do we do now? Go to Google. Can we just do that? And in case you're wondering, yes, you can access regular websites on the clearnet with the Tor browser. You can even see our circuit right here. Click on that little circuit. It shows you our three onions. We're going through, got a German Austrian and Dutch onion. And just to hit home our anonymity, keep an eye on that Dutch IP address. What's my IP address? It's actually IPV six Fun. If we look there, that matches it up. But still, where's the dark web? I thought we were here. That's kind of the point. The dark web is dark. You get there and you're like, this here, Lexi, let me do that for you. You're like this. That's the dark web. It's a bunch of websites interconnected by these onions and nothing can really find them. Not even Google. And Google sees everything including you right now, wearing a black hoodie, eating Funions with Mountain Dew. It sees you. But even the Google spiders can't crawl these websites. They hate onions. And like I said, the dark web is filled with onions. Even every website you visit is an onion, even ends with onion. Let's try one site. We'll go to the official dark web version of the New York Times. Don't get excited. It's the same website. It's just on the dark web. I'll paste that here on my browser. Bam, just like this, notice it ends and dot onion instead of.com or.net or tech or coffee network. chuck.coffee. That's on the clearnet. And clearly you need some coffee. And if I hit enter, I'm now navigating to a dark web website. It just happens to be the New York Times. Now notice the website's kind of like you can't just remember that. That's crazy, right? It's a randomly generated string and that will be every dark web website. And if you're a big deal like the New York Times, you might get your name like this preprinted through some fancy measures, but it's always going to be something like this ending in onion. That's how you know you're on a dark web website. But the point I want to hit home here is that you would never ever be able to figure out how to get to this website unless the New York Times gave you their onion address. There's no way to search it or index it, which is how our current internet works. That's how we can discover things through search engines. This doesn't happen. It's dark, no flashlights, but you might see some candles along the way. There are some really cool ones called the Hidden Wiki. This is a dark web website that has a list of other dark websites. There's also a search engine on the dark web called amia. Amia, I'm not sure how to say it. And they'll search known dark web websites, but that's it. They can't index, they can't crawl. Now it's at this point that you might want to try and go around and find some interesting stuff because you're curious. No, right now this is not secure. We downloaded the TOR browser, launched it with default settings. It's not great. So let's move on to level two. The second most secure way to access the dark web, and this is definitely more secure but not the most secure. I probably still wouldn't do this if I were searching for stuff, you know what I mean? This will involve the same thing as level one, but adding an extra layer of protection, kind of like an onion. We'll still have our same tour browser, we'll need that. But before we connect to the Tor network, we'll first connect to V P N and we'll also change some settings in our tour browser that are highly recommended because you don't want to be sitting there hanging out in the dark web and all of a sudden you get a phone call or a knock on the door and you're like, what did I do? True story from someone Coffee break. So back here at my TOR browser, I'm going to disconnect from the TOR network and I'll just close my TOR browser. Now, I'll set up V P N real quick. I'm using nord. You can use whatever you want as long as you trust it. And then I'll connect to V P N and then launch my TOR browser. Now, why do this? Why use V P N before we connect to the TOR network? Aren't we already protected? Aren't we already anonymous? Yes, to a point. You see right here is what we're worried about. When you try to connect to the TOR network, you know who can see that? You're connecting to the TOR network, your I S P, your internet provider. They see that. They recognize that network. In fact, it's easily detectable. I actually have tor blocked on my business network here. I don't know what my employees are doing and I had to unblock it for this video. Now also, that first onion router you connect to, I'm going to draw an onion, looks like an apple. Lemme give you some layers here. It looks like someone bit an apple. Anyways, that first onion router you connect to, they can see your IP address, they know you. Now further down the line, you're protected, you're anonymous. But it's those little weak areas that may not seem like a big deal. Those are the ways that people usually get found out and tracked on the dark web. You've heard of criminals getting arrested for dark web marketplace stuff. That's how it happens. It's these little leaks. It's how the F B I and the C I A can track these things. But if we use our V P N, we're encrypted here. Our IP address is hidden here first before we connect to the Torah network, adding that extra layer of security and also by default, our connection isn't that safe. Let's change some settings real quick. Part of our level two security level three is going to blow your mind, trust me. But this one, this is pretty good. So we'll click on configure connection, and over here we have privacy and security. Let's go ahead and click on that. From here, we'll browse down until we see security and security level. Right now we're on standard, which means all browser and website features are enabled. You don't want that in the dark web. There's a lot of things that hackers can do using all those features and you don't want those things enabled. So we're going to go to the safest option. We're going to change our choice here and here. Things like JavaScript are disabled by default on all websites. And really with that one change, that's pretty much all you have to worry about. For most things. With level two, you're safe but not completely safe. But let's go ahead and connect to the dark web. We have our TOR connection. We'll see if the ccia A website's working the dark web website and notice there's a cia.gov at the beginning. It's kind of cool. Here we are. Ccia A on the dark web. You don't get cooler than that. You know you want to try it. That's level two. Now, level three, level three, it's intense, but it is secure and you're going to have the most fun with this one, trust me. And really it's one of the only ways I can recommend you use to access the dark web. Anything else at your own risk. Now here's what we're doing this. We're going to create a computer on this U S B drive, and that's what you're going to need. A U S B drive like this. The computer we create on this U S B drive has goldfish memory. Every time you use it, it forgets that you did untraceable. This portable operating system or a computer is called Tails Linux, the Amnesic Incognito live system. And how do you know what's good? Well, it's trusted by Edwards Snowden and he's still chilling in Russia, so it's pretty good. It also uses the Tour Network by default. So when you use the super secret portable computer, all your traffic is going across the onions. It's all onions all the time. I hope you like onions. Now I know it might sound complicated. How do I get that set up? It's actually not that bad. Again, all you'll need is A U S B drive with at least eight gigs of space, eight gigabytes, which most have that. I got this on Amazon, like a pack of like 10 for I don't know how much it was cheap though. And here's how it works. Lemme show you demonstration time. All you'll do is you'll shut down your computer, plug this U S B stick in, boot up your computer and through your boot options say, I want to boot from this guy. Suddenly you're using Tails Linux. It's amazing. Let's get it set up right now. The first thing we'll do is grab our U S B stick and plug it into our computer. And by the way, you can do this with almost any computer as long as it's not too old. But think about that. You want to use your friend's computer for something quick. Maybe you're at the library Best Buy. I don't know, maybe don't do that. But you can boot into this stick and not leave a trace of where you've been, what you did or anything powerful. Let's get it set up. We'll then open our web browser and go out to tails.net. From here, we'll click on install tails. And while there are a number of ways to run this, the only way recommended is via a S B stick. Go ahead and click on that and we'll download the tails U s B image. Actually, while that's downloading, we need a way to write that image to our U S B stick. The best software I know about is Bena Etcher. Just head out to etcher.bena.io. Click on Download Etcher. It's a free software and I usually download the portable version because I try to avoid installing things. That's just me. And once downloaded, we'll go ahead and launch that. Now. Fun fact, the Bena Etcher is what we use to image over a hundred SD cards for a Mr Beast video that's coming soon. With bena Open, we'll click on flash from file and choose the tails image that we just downloaded open. Then we'll select our target, which sounds kind of aggressive, but all we're doing is selecting our U S B stick. I'll click on that and then click on flash. Sorry, a little too much coffee. And let it write that sucker. Now this is all we have to do really. Once this is finished, we're done. Then we can just use it. The flesh is complete. Now let's grab our U S B stick. And now let's use it to access the dark web in the most secure way. Got my laptop here and the first thing I'll do is shut the sucker down. I'm currently in Windows, but not for long. Computer is shut down and now I can safely plug in my U S B drive and with my U S B drive plugged in, I'll now boot up my computer. Here's where it gets kind of tricky, but when get to your boot menu here on my laptop, I think it's going to be F 12. When I see the BIOS menu come up, yep, F 12 for me. But as soon as your computer starts to boot, you want to press F 12, F 10, delete, whatever it might be to get to your bios, boot options. And here I'm going to scroll down until I get to my U SS B drive right there and hit enter right now. No hands. Here we go. Booting into tails Linux. Now here we're almost ready to start tails, but we have some options. The main one you might want to consider is creating persistent storage. Meaning that some things like your documents and downloads, you may want to keep on there, but you may not want to do that given the fact that you're trying to remain anonymous, leaving no trace, the most secure ways to leave it off. And that's the default behavior. That's kind of cool. Tails has pretty good default security behavior. So we'll go ahead and start tales. So here we have tales at Linux running on A U S B stick and it's a full-blown oss. Now the first thing we have to worry about is, hey, this guy right here, we are not connected to any kind of wifi or internet. Let's take care of that. I'll select my network. Now, I'll say that some people do have issues getting tails to work with their wifi drivers. They're wireless car drivers. My laptop worked out of the box. I didn't do anything. I'll connect to pumpkin juice. But if you have any issues, you can actually buy a wireless little dongle or connection that'll connect you. And if the computer has an ethernet connection, hardwire with the cable, it'll probably be fine. Now here I've got my TOR connection. I'll connect automatically. Definitely want that TOR bridge. I'm not going to cover that here, but if you have issues connecting to tor, maybe you're being blocked. That's a way to bypass it. I got to change my display settings. I can't see all my stuff, but notice it's really snappy, it's really quick. And now I can select Connect Tor and I'll start my Tor browser. Now, level three, this is the best way to access the dark web, a portable computer that forgets you used it. If you want to add on another layer of security, which I do recommend, you could connect to V P N before you connect via tour here, the V P N tour tails altogether, that's powerful. And then when you're done, you just shut this thing down, power off, unplug your U S B stick. You were never here. Now there is one more way you can access the dark web that I think is probably one of the more secure options, maybe even more secure than tails. That's debatable. So here it is, level three and three quarters maybe. This is what I use to browse the dark web. It's the Network Chuck Cloud browser. So I'll head to browser.network chuck.com. And if you've never heard of this, I'll show you real quick what it does. I'll get logged in and here have the option of choosing a browser I want to launch. Now, what's a cloud browser? What this is, I'll just give you a quick overview. You have a whole video about it if you want to learn more. But all I'm doing is when I click one of these things, let's say we want to click the Tor browser, which we will, it's going to launch another computer somewhere else in the world and then launch a browser inside of that. In our case, it'll be the Tor browser with one click. I can even tell it where I want to be. Europe, India, south America, whatever I'll do auto, it'll be in us to make it fast. Launch my session and just like that, I'm on the Onion Network. I'm in the dark web on another computer somewhere else in the world. I think that's pretty secure. And bonus, you can use this on your phone. But anyways, that's the three or three and three quarters ways that you can access the dark web. I can really only recommend level three and above. So three and three quarters when you're trying to access the dark web. And just be careful even when you think you're super secure. Level three snowed in level, things can still happen. Just always be aware that you are navigating a dark part of the internet with no oversight. That's why we're being so careful. So do everything with extra precautions. When you download something, maybe disconnect from the internet before you try to open it. That thing might explode if it's connected to the internet. And when I say explode, I mean it might connect with some other system or service and hack you or something that can happen. Now, these risks are lower when you're using Tales Linux on a portable U S B or you're using the network Chuck Cloud browser. But don't become one of those scary stories that people talk about when they mention the dark web. Stay safe.