When you search on Google, it feels like the entire internet is at your fingertips. News headlines, recipes, holiday deals, even the latest gossip — all of it appears within seconds. But what if I told you that everything you can see, all the billions of pages catalogued by Google and Bing, amounts to less than 20 per cent of the web?

The rest is hidden, submerged beneath the surface like the bulk of an iceberg. That hidden web is much bigger than the one you and I casually browse each day. And it has layers.

The first layer is familiar — the surface web. Think of it as the bright main street of a city: shopfronts, addresses and neatly signposted avenues. Search engines act like librarians, constantly wandering these streets and making notes, so when you search, they already know where to point you. But the city doesn’t end at the main road.

Behind those shopfronts are private networks. Your home wi-fi is one. Inside it, your phones, tablets, televisions and laptops communicate with each other, but none of it is visible to Google. Businesses have even bigger private networks, entire digital cities of their own, with thousands of employees logging in through VPNs and secure portals. These aren’t shady places — they’re just not meant for the public.

Beyond that lies the deep web, where the real weight of the internet sits. Online banking, medical records, corporate databases, cloud storage — all protected by logins and passwords. Search engines might see the ‘front doors’ of these systems, but they can’t step inside.

And then there is the dark web — a much smaller but far more notorious corner. It can’t be reached through Google. Instead, you need special tools, like the Tor browser, which bounces and encrypts your traffic to keep identities hidden. Originally created by the U.S. Navy to protect intelligence communications, it still has important uses today: protecting whistleblowers, helping activists in censored countries and securing conversations for human rights groups.

But the same cloak of anonymity that shelters the good also shelters the bad. Over the years, underground marketplaces sprang up where drugs, weapons, hacking tools and stolen data could be bought and sold. Hackers break into databases, strip out usernames, passwords and credit cards, then sell them in bulk. A Facebook login might fetch only a few dollars. A stolen credit card goes for 10 or 20. A full identity — what criminals call a ‘fullz’, including your name, address, date of birth, banking and sometimes even medical information — can go for hundreds. Multiply that by thousands of records from a single breach, and you see why this hidden economy thrives.

This is the part of the internet you’re never meant to see — and yet, it has a direct impact on your life. Every old account you’ve forgotten, every password you’ve reused, every system you’ve left unpatched could one day show up for sale in those hidden alleys.

In the closing segment of my podcast, Don’t Click That Link, I’ll Do It For You, we pull apart a real scam each month. This time it’s the Origin Energy refund email. It looks legit at first — a friendly note saying you’ve overpaid and a refund is waiting. You click, land on a page that mirrors the real Origin site, and it starts asking for your name, address, date of birth, even your card details.

Hear what happens next — and how to spot it — on this month’s Ask a Tech podcast: From Google to the Dark Web: Inside the Hidden Internet Hundreds of Times Bigger.

It’s a textbook example of how criminals exploit trust, urgency and brand recognition to slip past our defences. And it shows how easily the data they harvest can end up on those dark web shelves, traded and resold for profit.

If you’d like to hear the full breakdown — and learn more about how the web you can’t see dwarfs the one you can — listen to our latest episode: From Google to the Dark Web: Inside the Hidden Internet Hundreds of Times Bigger. You’ll come away with a better understanding of the internet’s hidden layers, and more importantly, how to keep yourself from becoming just another entry for sale in the underground economy.

As always, I hope you’ve learnt something new. For a deeper dive into this topic, check out the podcast. And if you have questions, you can reach me at askatech@mmg.com.au

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Sunday, 5th February 2023

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