How to Make Sure an 'Onion' Site on the Dark Web Is Legitimate
The dark web isn't just for illicit activities. In fact, many legitimate online platforms maintain a ".onion" domain on the dark web for privacy reasons, including media outlets like ProPublica and BBC News, social media sites like Facebook, and privacy-conscious communication platforms like Proton Mail and SecureDrop. But this also provides perfect cover for criminals and hackers who create clones of legitimate dark web sites to steal sensitive data and cryptocurrency from privacy-conscious users. And given that onion links are long and jumbled , it’s easy for users to accidentally click on the wrong link and end up on a fake website instead of the real one. When the FBI seized 276 onion addresses during 2014's Operation Onymous, they found that 153 of them were phishing sites. Thankfully, Tor Browser already has a cryptography-backed feature that can verify the authenticity of an onion site, by confirming whether it has end-to-end encryption and extended valida...