Hong Kong government ‘powerless’ against ‘deep web’ threat
Legislator and expert sounds alarm about government approach to danger of malicious software from parts of internet rarely glimpsed by average users
Hong Kong authorities are powerless to police clandestine activities flourishing in the “deep web” – the unseen portion of the internet that makes up 96 per cent of online content – because there is no legal basis to do so, according to local cybersecurity experts.
Speaking to the Post, Duncan Wong, director of security and data sciences at the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute, saidonly four per cent of the web can be got to by conventional search engines.
The rest, called the deep web, is unsearchable and password-protected. Inside the deep web, there is also an area known as the “dark web”, which can only be accessed using identity-hiding encryption technology.
“The dark web is a collection of websites. This collection can be accessed anonymously,” said Wong, who frequently surfs it to gather intelligence on the latest hacking trends. “A part of the dark web is pretty dark. People use it to exchange malicious software, like recently popular ransomware.
“On the dark web, people are also selling drugs and some websites are related to pornography.”
Ransomware is malware that encrypts files in victims’ computers, rendering them unrecoverable. Victims are then told to pay a ransom in bitcoin to unlock them.