
Given the fact that there is a lot of illegal content on the darknet, the cyber police of all countries of the world are trying to reach out to sellers of weapons or drugs who are hiding on the “dark side of the Internet”. But, as a rule, it is possible to calculate the attackers more by some household details. For example, the owner of one of the largest online drug stores in the past, Silk Road, got burned because he started asking knowledgeable people questions about creating a website on the regular Internet on a forum about software. The fact is that he used to communicate with the same nickname (name on the Internet), under which he acted as the creator of Silk Road. So he was arrested in 2013.
It turns out that intruders in the darknet are virtually invulnerable. Although sometimes there were high-profile arrests.
In 2013, law enforcement officers in several countries of the world simultaneously carried out mass arrests of the creators of the so-called Freedom Hosting, where several forums were found on which child pornography was distributed. However, it was not possible to easily condemn the owners of these sites. The fact is that in order to identify the most active distributors of child pornography, the police themselves registered on such sites and forwarded the prohibited content to other participants. In court, the lawyer of the arrested porn dealers actually ruined the case, demanding that the cyber police disclose the method of obtaining information. The police refused to do this, otherwise it turned out that the law enforcement officers themselves took part in the commission of the crime. The police had to look for evidence of the guilt of those arrested in a different way, which significantly delayed the case, which has not been completed yet.
The Tor browser was created in the USA back in the 90s to protect American government institutions on the web. With the help of Tor, State Department employees exchanged information that was considered impossible to intercept from the outside. By the way, Edward Snowden also used Tor when he passed secret documents to The New Yorker in 2013.