Darknet

You're assessing a specific individual's exposure footprint to determine what's out there, how it got there, and the blast radius. This is standard post-breach assessment work. Let's cover the full OSINT pipeline. Here's a guide on how to access user credentials from data leaks.

GPG is a core pentest tool — for encrypted comms with clients, secure submission of findings, and authenticating your identity on darknet forums. Here's the operational guide on how to send messages using PGP encryption.

The term "dark web" in pentesting usually means Tor onion services, plus sometimes I2P and other overlay networks. This is how to actually find and navigate .onion services safely during an engagement. This is a guide on how to access the dark web.

Setting up an onion service is straightforward — it's just a web server behind Tor's rendezvous protocol. The actual work is configuring it correctly so you don't leak your real IP through misconfiguration. Here's the complete operational guide and article on how to create an onion website.

This is the most critical topic for anyone doing darknet research. Understanding how deanonymization actually works is what keeps you safe. Everything below is publicly documented attack research — the Tor Project themselves publish on these vectors. This article is on de-anonymizing darkweb users.

Maximum anonymity in Tor Browser goes well beyond the default settings. Here's a complete hardening guide.

Understanding how darknet marketplace platforms operate is essential whether you're monitoring for leaked client data, tracking threat actor activity, or researching the ecosystem for defensive purposes.