At the Chaos Computer Congress in Hamburg, Germany today, University of Portsmouth computer science researcher Gareth Owen will present the results of a six-month probe of the web’s collection of Tor hidden services, which include the stealthy websites that make up the largest chunk of the Dark Web. "There are important uses for hidden services, such as when human rights activists use them to access Facebook or to blog anonymously," he wrote, referring to Facebook's launch of its own hidden service in October. "These uses for hidden services are new and have great potential." These relays allowed them to assemble an unprecedented collection of data about the total number of Tor hidden services online—about 45,000 at any given time—and how much traffic flowed to them.  Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption The study sought to find out which hidden Tor sites got the most traffic 
 
 Most traffic to sites hidden on the Tor network go to those dealing in images of child sexual abuse a study suggests. Roger Dingledine, one of the original developers of Tor, also said the methodology of the study - which only scanned long-lived sites to see what content they offered - made it hard to draw conclusions about what people did on the network. "[The study] could either show a lot of people visiting abuse-related hidden services, or it could simply show that abuse-related hidden services are more long-lived than others," he writes. In November, the FBI and Europol staged a massive bust of Tor hidden services that included dozens of drug and money laundering sites, including three of the six most popular anonymous online drug markets.
– Between March and September of last year, four out of five visits to a major part of the Dark Web—the anonymous corner of the Internet—were to sites exhibiting the sexual abuse of children, says a new study picked up by Wired. These sites account for only 2% of the Dark Web, but got five times more traffic (or about 83%) than other sites, like those selling drugs, offering gambling, or providing a haven for whistleblowers. "Before we did this study, it was certainly my view that the dark net is a good thing. But it’s … creating a place where pedophiles can act with impunity," says UK computer science researcher Gareth Owen. The websites studied are part of Tor hidden services—which allows users to surf the web anonymously, BBC explains—and they occupy the biggest chunk of the Dark Web. Owen used relay computers and a web-crawling program to collect his data. Tor executives point out the results could be distorted, and Owen acknowledges that "caution is advised" when assessing them. "We do not know the cause of the high hit count (to child abuse sites) and cannot say with any certainty that it corresponds with humans," he says. It's possible the traffic could be caused by law enforcement groups conducting investigations or hackers flooding the sites with fake visits. And then there's the positive justification for an anonymous web. "There are important uses for hidden services, such as when human rights activists use them to access Facebook or to blog anonymously," says Tor's executive director. Still, law enforcement and politicians are expected to push for a crackdown because of the study, and Owen says there may be ways to block child abuse sites. (A chunk of the Dark Web was shut down in November.)