Darknetstats DarkNet Dictionary!

Updated July 18th, 2019

For those of you that are just beginning with the DarknetMarkets, we have compiled a list of the terms you might come across while browsing around including links to important resources, have any term that is missing here?  let us know! something needs fixing?  contact us! or leave a comment, Thanks to the redditors / mods who helped us compile this list, we will keep it growing and updating.

3DD – 3 Day delivery.

420 – From wikipedia: is a code-term used primarily in North America that refers to the consumption of cannabis and by extension, as a way to identify oneself with cannabis subculture or simply cannabis itself. Observances based on the number 420 include smoking cannabis around the time 4:20 p.m. (with some sources also indicating 4:20 a.m

4/20 – 20th of april sale – also known as the special sale when the vendor Tony76 executed the most famous Scam on Silk road.

Administrator – In charge of a collection of services a year or two ago, including TorStatusNet, Hidden Image Board, a hosting service.

Altcoin – Any digital cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin, altcoin – any digital cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin.

Anonymity – This thing you want to have if you dont want to be found while using dark net markets.

AnonFiles – File upload site (defunct now). You want to send a PDF/image/whatever to another user? Upload it to anonfiles, then you can share your custom link, and whoever you send it to can download your file anonymously.

Astrid – Creator and Moderator of /r/DarkNetMarkets, very promiscuous has had relations with all Moderators there, also is the CSS guru!

Avengers – A group of individuals who are well known for ordering LSD from many vendors back in the day of Silk Road 1.0, reagent testing it, consuming it, a writing reviews about the quality of the products. They currently can be found on the deep web on the Majestic Garden forum.

AYB – All You’re Base, general Onionland portal

AYW – THW without the CP. Known formally as All You’re Wiki. Most people use it now.

Backopy – The Administrator of Black Market Reloaded (BMR)

Bergie Web – The level of the internet hierarchy that comes between the “surface” and the “deep web,” if you are comparing the internet to an ocean. This includes porn, chans, and other sites that provide you with information on how to access the deep web. Peer-to-peer file sharing networks are also part of this level.

Bitcoinfog – “Wash” your bitcoins. Bitcoins can be traced, so let’s say you received bitcoins from an illegal activity, those coins can be traced back to you if you use them on another website that is linked to your real identity (localbitcoins, paypal, bitstamp, MtGox etc). This handy website will erase all traces on your coins. the service is accessible here:  fogcore5n3ov3tui.onion

Bitcoins – an open source, peer-to-peer payment network and pseudo-anonymous digital currency being used for almost all transaction on the darknet.

Black Market Reloaded – Also known as BMR,the oldest dark net market since Silk Road was shut down, the site is currently offline and planned to be back with a newer version.

Blockchain – Wikipedia Definition: A block chain is a transaction database shared by all nodes participating in a system based on the Bitcoin protocol

BotDW – Boss of the Deep Web

Buyers – Markplace user that is not a vendor. (duh)

Carding – The practice of stealing and selling credit card information

CD (Controlled Delivery) – The technique of controlled delivery is used when a consignment of illicit drugs is detected and allowed to go forward under the control and surveillance of law enforcement officers in order to secure evidence against the organizers of such illicit drug traffic.

Cirrus – A silk road forum moderator.

Chisquare/psi – Hugest faggot, avoid him more. Hosts numerous services. (Its not us who said this!)

Cipherspace – tor hidden services / i2p / freenet / any other anonymity network

Cold Storage – a secure offline wallet for your Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies

CP – When mentioned in the context of the deep web – it usually mean Child pornography, something you should know and avoid at all cost when browsing around.

Clearnet – regular internet (non TOR)

Cryptography – All the means of hiding and encrypting the data that you send over the internet.

Crypto News – (wittvywowuxp35s6.onion) is a hidden service for news about privacy,security,politics and technology. The owner only updates sporadicly and focuses a lot on I2P.

Dark Net – A general term that describes the hidden websites hosted on the TOR / I2P and other networks that you cannot access with regular internet connection without using some special software or get crawled by Google and other search engines.

Dark Nexus – HTTP Refresh Chat

DarkNetMarkets – Was a sub Reddit meant for the discussion of the various Dark Net markets.

DDOS Attack – Denial-of-service attack Form of an attack that is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users, was common on Silk road, some say it was used to locate the server location using a know tor vulnerability.

DBAN – Darik’s Boot and Nuke software for wiping you harddrive from all information.

Deep Web – Synonymous with “Dark Net”.

DeepDotWeb – The news site where this list was originally created, can be found here: www.deepdotweb.com A Blog focusing on deepweb news (seized in may 2019).

Defcon – The alias of Silk Road 2.0 Admin. A person named Blake Benthall who was arrested During Operation Onymous is alleged to be him.

Dispute – In our context, this term is usually used to describe a disagreement between a buyer and a seller on the markets.

Digitalink – a/k/a Jacob Theodore George IV, according to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Digitalink was the first vendor on Silk Road selling illegal drugs to be arrested.

DoD / Coachella / HH (and some others) – A Well known scammer & troll, was eventually doxxed on some article and was not seen much since.

Domestic – A term that refers to making an order from a vendor the resides on the same country as the buyer.

Donations – You will encounter many requests for them on the darknet markets, will usually list a bitcoin address.

Doxx – The act of posting in a public forum the personally identifying information of a pseudonym used by an individual or the information posted therein.

Dread Pirate Roberts – The pseudonym used by the administrator of the original Silk Road market. It has been speculated that more than one person may have been using this pseudonym, but “Ross William Ulbricht” has been indited by the FBI as being the sole owner.

DDG/Duck Duck Go – A search engine that respects privacy.

Emergency BTC Address — An address to be held on record to send all funds to in case of a market shutdown. This would ideally be a cold storage address with no information that could be used to connect the owner to their identity. This address would only be checked after a market was shut down in order to recover outstanding funds.

Encryption — Using secret information to make it infeasible without knowledge of said information to decipher the ‘cypher-text’ produced into a plain text message. This can take one of two forms, symmetric encryption which used a shared secret that both parties must know in advance, or public key cryptography where the information to encrypt the information differs from the secret needed to decrypt the information.

Escrow – the use of a neutral third party to ensure that a transaction payment will be made to a seller on completion of items sent to a buyer. Generally after a purchase is made, the funds are held ‘in escrow’ to be released when the buyer states the seller has met the terms of the purchase. Generally the third party will also offer arbitration in case of a dispute between the two parties.

Electrum plugin – Used on The Marketplace to create multi signature transactions with a click of a button .

Exit Scam – A term used to describe a situation where a market admin or a vendor wants to retire, and is doing so while taking as much money as possible from their users / buyers.

• Vendors: usually by offering some great deal and abusing the reputation they gained so far by requiring people to not use the escrow protection and collecting as much money as possible (without sending out anything) before shutting down the store and running with as much BTC as they can.
• Market admins: usually locking users funds on the market, just to shut it down completely soon after.

Fagmin/dgft – New Admin Of Torchan

FBI – the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is the USA’s state-wide police who prosecute violations of federal laws. They do not involve themselves in violations of state law.

FE  -Finalize early. This is the release of escrow funds before the seller knows that the conditions of the contract have been met. This is used to reduce seller risk from BTC price fluxuation, and against market shutdown. This is also used to scam buyers as after the escrow has been released there is no recourse for the buyer if the seller does not deliver on their promises.

Feedback — a message left from a seller to the vendor, or vice versa, about how well a transactions went. It is considered good form to not reveal any information about the methods the seller used to ship the order nor the vendor’s or seller’s location or details. This is made publicly available to allow users of a site to determine if they should trust the vendor or seller

Flush (Curtis Green) — An individual the FBI accuses Dread Pirate Roberts of ordering to be murdered. This person is also accused of being ‘Chronicpain’ from the Silk Road Forums, and an employee of Silk Road.

Freedom Hosting – Huge free web provider. Some of its services hosted child porn. Busted by the feds around the same time SR was busted. SR also was hosted on it for a while before it switched to a dedi server.

Freenet – a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication.

FUD – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt

Galaxy Deep Web Social Network –  (hbjw7wjeoltskhol.onion/) is the currently most active dark net chat, a great place to keep in touch with friends and vendors, share the newest FUD and fuck up your OPSEC while waiting for your order to be shipped. (defunct now)

Gawker — an online blog that reports on web trends. Notable for being one of the first major sites to report on the existence of the Silk Road on 2011-06-01 at gawker.com/the-underground-website-where-you-can-buy-any-drug-imag-30818160

GCHQ – British Government Communications Headquarters, equivalent to the NSA in the United States.

Grams –  Cross Marketplace search engine for the DeepWeb (see the sidebar link here)

HackBB – Famous was a hacking phpBB board, also hosted downloads for files like zeuS.

Hard Candy – Infamous page on Hidden Wiki for child porn.

Harry71 – Onion Spider Robot (skunksworkedp2cg.onion/) was a daily updated extensive list of Onion sites. The owner runs a crawler that checks if the sites are up, fetches the link and title and dumps it on his homepage.The site also contains some statistics about uptime and hosts.

Hidden Service – Another term for a .onion domain name. It can only be accessed through the Tor network, and cannot be seized by a government.

Honeypot – A hidden service or other website setup by law enforcement in attempt to attract and trap people who participate in illegal activities. Other cited uses include helping the military and government protect their secrets and the FBI defending large businesses.

Hushmail – An email provider that focuses on privacy and used industry standard protocols PGP and 256-bit AES encryption. It claims to be secure to the extent that not even company employees can read the contents your emails. Hushmail is known to cooperate with law enforcement by handing over encrypted emails.

Hidden Wiki – a ‘hidden service’ website on the Tor anonymous network that allows for open editing of subjects related to hidden services and activity in them. “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”

Hub Forums – An Onion based platform for cross marketplace discussion, like DNM sub reddit, but forum based and fully anonymous .

I2P — The ‘Invisible Internet Project’. Originally designed as a way to be able to use IRC anonymously, it has become one of the more popular anonymous networks. While similar to Tor, key differences include the fact that I2P focuses on gaining access to sites within the network, and not to the Internet at large. Not as much academic research has been done on this project as Tor. This service is very popular in Russia. About half the routers appear to be located there. Details can be found at geti2p.net

International – Outside of one’s own country. Some avoid international transactions because customs adds time and risk to an order. Some countries such as Australia are known for having customs that are extremely hard to get an order past.

ISP –  Internet service provider.

IRC – Internet Relay Chat. A communication system allowing easy transfer of messages in the form of text. It is intended for group discussion in sessions called channels.

JB – See hard candy, except for teens.

Lavabit – A defunct email provider that shut down in August 2013 after being forced to hand over its SSL private keys to the US government.

LE / LEO’s / LEA’s –  Law Enforcement / Law Enforcement Officers / Law Enforcement Agents

Library – Usually refers to Tor Library, the largest centralized eBook service on the Darknet.

Libertas — Pseudonym used by one of the original Silk Road forum administrators, and also used by one the administrators of Silk Road 2. Arrest by thr ‘Garda Siochana’ (irish police).

Liberte – Another Linux distribution similar to TAILS and Whonix with the purpose of enabling anyone to communicate safely and covertly in hostile environments.

Litecoins — an alternative cryptocurrency, similar to bitcoin. The key difference is that while bitcoin uses hashcash-SHA256^2 at the ‘proof of work’, litecoin uses hashcash-Scrypt which is designed to use more memory and be less subject to custom hardware designed to solve the problem quickly. More details of this difference may be found at: en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hashcash

LocalBitcoins — an site designed to allow over the counter trading of bitcoins. Famed for it’s anonymous nature people who sell on the site have been under constant pressure to avoid being prosecuted as unlicensed money traders. This extra risk and the extra work generally cause a significant price difference between the site and a more open (and regulated) exchange.

Love Letter – An official confiscation notice from the postal service sent to the recipient letting him know that his parcel was seized.  In some cases, vendors sent fake love letters to create the false impression of a seized package and scam the buyer.

Marco Polo Taks Force – A multi law enforcement agency task force based in Baltimore put together to investigate to investigate Silk Road and eventually included investigators from the FBI, DEA, DHS, the IRS, U.S. Postal Inspection, U.S. Secret Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives

Mariana’s Web – Urban legend of a secret website in the deepweb.

Marketplaces – catch all term for web sites set up to allow trade between vendors and buyers. When used in the context of sale of illegal goods, these usually provide anonymity to the buyer and seller, a method of escrow to ensure to reduce risk from new vendors and sellers, and a method of advertising goods to be sold at a price so that a purchase may be initiated and paid for without involvement of the seller. Most markets are also set up as ‘hidden services’ under anonymity networks like tor, i2p, or freenet, although there do exist some ‘clearnet’ markets that operate over standard HTTP/HTTPS.

Mixie – First major service operator on Tor in 2007. Services include a basic message board on the home page, a PM service, a “create your own bbs-like board” system (anyone could create a community for free) called SnapBBS, and a few more features. Also hosted an OnionNet IRC server.

Molly – any damned thing you can shove into a gelcap and get somebody to buy. In theory, this is supposed to be MDMA in the gelcap, but more commonly you get something like methylone, BZP, a benzofuran, talc, or something potentially toxic like PMA. Test first before consuming, dancesafe.org/health-and-safety/adulterant-screening-kit-instructions is a good resource.Monero – a newer more privacy focused cryptocurrency that’s being accepted by some darknet markets.

MSM – Main Stream Media — Big news outlets designed for common consumption by the masses. These can range from more neutral sites like the BBC in the UK, Al Jazeera in the middle east, or The New York Times in the USA, to sites like the Daily Fail, Fox News, or Pravda which are not as known for being well vetting their news articles.

MtGox – Magic: The Gathering Online exchange. One of the first public exchanges for bitcoins to currencies such as USD. Because it was designed in haste, it has been plagued with issues of security. Widely considered to be completely insolvent, a lack of transparency has allowed constant rumour to circulate. They are no longer taking exchanges after claiming to be defrauded by outside parties taking advantages of quirks in the bitcoin protocol.

Multi Signature Escrow – Where an address is signed by both the buyer and the seller with their private keys. The buyer will send funds to the address and the seller ships the product. If both parties are happy they sign off on the address and release the funds in escrow.

Nameless – IRC server hosted by chi. No identities, all usernames randomly generated.

Nekro – Huge faggot, avoid him. (he said this, not us!)

MTLjohn – Was a funny Scammer on SR1 , kept popping again and again under different identities just to be exposed each by another vendor (LuckyLuciano) since he was so easy to provoke.

NDD –  Next day delivery.

Onion – a hidden website using the Tor network. Name comes from the ‘onion routing’ used by tor. The url is composed of a hash of information used to identify the correct system, so most addresses are somewhat random. While creating an onion is easy, and the routing itself has few known weaknesses, securing such a site to leak no information is exceptionally difficult.

Onion Browser — A web browser like the Tor Browser Bundle (TBB). A web browser designed to work with the tor network to browse hidden services and normal websites anonymously, without leaking user information. While easier to use properly without leaking information, bugs in a browser can cause serious problems, such as the javascript bug that was used in part to shut down Freedom Hosting.

OnionForum – The original forum for Tor created by Legith in the early days of ’05.

Onionland – A general term to describe tor hidden services

OnionNet – First real IRC network designed for Onionland. All IRC ops are pedophiles though. Long history but not many people use it anymore.

Onion Routing – A technique for anonymous communication over a computer network. Messages are repeatedly encrypted and send through multiple network nodes. The process is comparable to peeling an onion, each node removes a layer of encryption uncovering routing instructions for the following layer.

opDarknet – Campaign launched by Anonymous a couple years ago. Targeted child porn sites as well as Freedom Hosting.

Operation Onymous – A global crackedown on the darknet markets during November 2014, in which many sites were seized and several people arrested.

Optimus Crime/OC – Admin of HackBB.

OPSEC – Operation Security. The process of protecting little pieces of data that could be grouped together to form a bigger picture, or expose your identity.

OrBot – a mobile version of the tor router for Android. Can be found on the Google Play store. Designed to either work with it’s own browser, or can be set up to work as proxy for any system that supports it. Can also be used on a rooted device to provide a transparent proxy that will force all apps to use tor for connecting.

OS –  Operating system.

Pastebin – A website used to store text for a certain period of time. It is popular on the deep web because it is an easy way to anonymously share information.

Parallel construction – Parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel – or separate – evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to conceal how the investigation began.

PGP/GPG – Pretty Good Privacy/ Gnu Privacy Guard. PGP was introduced in 1991, and was formalized with RFC 2440 and RFC 4880. Uses a combination of public-key and symmetric-key cryptography to ensure that messages can be delivered without a third party gaining access to the contents of the message. It also allows for a message to be signed so that the author of the message is indisputable. Many different algorithms can be used for the encryption, but the most commonly used methods are RSA for the public key crypto, and AES for the symmetric cypher. It is extremely important hat the public key of any party be fully verified in order to know that the message is being delivered to the correct recipient or is from the correct sender.

P2P Escrow – Most commonly used to refer transactions using ‘P2SH’ addresses as defined by BIP 016. A public key is provided by a seller, market, and vendor, and used to create an address which requires two of the three parties to sign in order to redeem. The buyer than pays to this address. Of extreme importance is the ‘redeemScript’ which details the information needed to redeem funds send to the address, which is a hash of the redeemScript. The goal of this method is that no one party has enough information to take funds from these P2SH addresses. Even if the market is hacked or taken down, the funds cannot be seized, and a buyer and seller can, with the redeemscript, finalize a transaction outside of the market’s involvement if they choose to.

Phishing – the act of using social engineering techniques to get private information such as user names and passwords. An example would be to send out a message claiming to be from an administrator asking for a password, or setting up a fraudulent website that a looks to be well know market’s site in order to gain user name and password information.

Pidgin OTR – Secured instant messaging software Pidgin is a free and open source client that lets you organize and manage your different Instant Messaging (IM) accounts using a single interface. The Off-the-Record (OTR) plug-in designed for use with Pidgin ensures authenticated and secure communications between Pidgin users.

PIN Code – Personal Identification Number Code. Uses as a secondary validation method to protect against loss of funds if the username and password are discovered. Generally it is only asked for during transfer of funds to outside the market or to confirm and finalize orders.

PM / DM –  Personal message/ DM: Direct message.

Processing Time – time required by a market or vendor in order to complete a transaction. Generally this involves waiting for sufficient confirmations on the blockchain to ensure a deposit has been met, or to run funds through a bitcoin mixer on the market. Also used to for time required by a vendor once getting a transaction to put the goods into the post.

Project Black Flag – Market set up shortly after the fall of the original Silk Road. Widely suspected to be a scam, this was confirmed to be the case after a short period of time.

Proxy – Unlike a VPN, a proxy is a service that only changes the IP address websites can see within your web browser, rather than on all applications on your computer.

RAT (Remote Administration Tool) – A piece of software that allows a remote operator to control a system as if he has physical access to that system.

RC (Research chemicals) – From wikipedia, Research Chemical are chemical substances used by scientists for medical and scientific research purposes. One characteristic of a research chemical is that it is for laboratory research use only. A research chemical is not intended for human or veterinary use.

Resolution – Used when there is a dispute between a buyer and seller. This usually involves whatever market used to serve as an arbitrator to determine how funds are to be released from escrow.

Reviews – the corpus of feedbacks left on a site, along with more information information gained by outside channels. Used by buyers to determine if they should take a vendor or buyer as legitimate.

Riseup / Safe-mail – Excellent e-mail services.

Ross Ulbricht — Accused of the FBI of being the sole owner of the pseudonym ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ and creator of the Silk Road. He was an Eagle Scout and in a known libertarian. The original Silk Road website went down after his arrest.

RTS – Return to sender.Shadow Web – A mythical part of the dark web that’s been perpetuated by creepypastas. Supposedly allows you to access an even darker network containing red rooms and cannibalism forums.

Same Same But Different (SSBD) –  Peter Phillip Nash,  Was arrested and accused in Australia for being on the Silk Road moderators

Samples – In the context of a market, a free or low cost item sent to a well known buyer in order to establish legitimacy. This proves that at least the seller has access to a product and is capable of delivering it in as secure way. The receiving party is expected to leave public feedback regarding the quality of the products and how well it’s been packaged.

Satoshi Nakamoto – A pseudonym of the person or group of people who created Bitcoin and anonymously published its source code.

Shared Send – A free method to tumble Bitcoins provided by blockchain.info. It routes transactions through a shared wallet breaking the chain of transactions.

Scammer – One who would attempt to defraud either a vendor or seller. For a vendor this can take the form of simply not ever sending products, sending poor quality or misrepresented products, or ‘selective scamming’ (See other entry).

Selective Scamming– Where known individuals are send product but large transactions or those from unknowns are not sent out. For a seller, this will mean that they claim to have not received goods that were delivered or that the goods were of poor quality/misrepresented.

Sheep – Second big online market to fail. Vendors flocked to the site citing it’s well polished vending design, and users followed. Disappeared without a trace taking all funds in escrow with it. Despite the manhunt that followed, it remains unclear if it was a deliberate scam, a result of being hacked, or a combination of the two.

Shipping – Process of a vendor packaging and sending goods. A source of extreme difficulty for vendors, and how many have been caught. Ideal methods will appear be legitimate business to individual packages and correspondence. It is considered poor form to disclose any specifics of a shipment made, as it could be used to target a vendor.

Shilling – Creating accounts on Reddit / Forums for the sole intention of posting Positive / Negative post about someone or something while trying to make them look authentic.

Silk Road – ‘The ebay of illegal goods’. First reported to a wide audience by Gawker 2011-06-01, it flourished due to a large vendor and user base, and strict controls to weed out scammers. Taken down after the arrest of Ross Ulbricht at the start of October, 2013. While it was not the first nor the last market for illegal items, none have matched it’s popularity and trust level given by vendors and users.SIGAINT – Tor-based darknet email service that allows you to send email without revealing your location or identity.  Its name is derived from SIGINT (“Signals Intelligence”), which refers to intelligence-gathering by interception of signals.

Silk Road 2.0 – The successor of the first Silk Road. Was seized during Operation Onymous, and Blake Benthall the alleged admin of the site (Defcon) was arrested.

SMAC – a tool that can change your MAC address

SMS4Tor – Self-destructing messages. Similar to Privnote but for Tor. I prefer this because it’s an onion address AND does not require javascript (Privnote requires JS). You type out a message on their site, create a custom link, and share it to another user. The link will only work once, and so whoever opens it first is the only one who can read it. A great alternative to PGP as it is much more user-friendly. Very secure when  combined with PGP encryption. *This one’s a little harder to find but if you google “self destruct message tor” you should be able to find it.

Stats (Buyer) – statistics used to determine legitimacy of buyers/sellers. Common are number of successful transactions, average reviews, and dollar amounts of successful transactions in total. These are usually imprecise in order to avoid anybody being profiled.

Stealth – Methods used by vendors during packaging to make them blend in with normal mail. Disclosing any particular method of stealth is considered extremely poor form. Examples of stealth methods include making the item appear to come from a legitimate, known business; hiding the product in another, nondescript looking item; and using moisture barrier bags or mylar to eliminate product odor from being emitted from the package. Ideally, you would be able to open the item and give a cursory inspection of all the contents and find nothing unusual, but in practice this can vary greatly.

Sub Reddits – one of the subforums from the popular reddit.com community. Many times shortened to r/subredditname in common discussion. A team of administrators that are usually not affiliated with reddit determines the content policy of the sub reddit, with the website taking a very hands off approach.

SQL injection – An database code injection technique, used to attack data driven applications in which malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field for execution, many markets got shut down or lost their money because of this type of attack.

Tails – Are you using just Tor Browser Bundle? Then consider TAILS, it’s an operating system specially made for anonymous activities that you boot from a CD or usb stick. It leaves no traces on your computer and has plenty of built in tools that come in handy.  *Check out their website, search “Tails boum” and you should find it very easily.

Talk.masked/core.onion – 2 of the first major forums in Onionland besides Onionforum.

Tony76 — Was a trusted vendor on SR1, than ran a massive “FE” scam, The FBI accuses DPR of placing a hit on the individual using this pseudonym. He scammed a large number of Silk Road users, but his true identity and the details of if he was killed or not are still in dispute.

Tor – The Onion Router. Uses ‘onion routing’ to provide anonymous access to the Internet by encrypting a message several times with each relay removing one layer before the final destination is reached. Funded heavily by the US government, it’s security has been a focus of much academic research with no serious known issues or backdoors that have been discovered yet. Used by journalists, government censors, and more to hide their true location and identity.

Torchat – IM service that works by having each user set up a ‘hidden service’ that can be used to contact them via Tor. Somewhat similar in purpose to OTR, but messages do not have plausible deniability.

Torch – Tor Search Engine (xmh57jrzrnw6insl.onion/) is your light in the dark net. Make sure to bookmark it if you want to wander the depths beyond your favorite markets.

Tormail – Tor Mail was a Tor hidden service that allowed to send and receive email anonymously, to email addresses inside and outside the Tor network. The service was seized by the FBI as part of the Freedom Hosting bust in August 2013.

Tor Browser Bundle (TBB) – A modified version of Firefox that allows people to easily use the Tor anonymity network. It is compatible with Windows, OS X, and Linux.

Tor Exit Node – The last relay that data traveling from its originator (a computer) to the recipient (a web server) travels through before reaching the recipient. To the recipient, traffic appears to originate from the exit node.

Tor Node – A data relay, either a connection point, a redistribution point (middle node), or an endpoint (exit node).

TS/LS/OPVA/pthc/PB/ptsc/petersburg/anything relating to a child/swirlface/r@ygold – AVOID. CP keywords.

Tumble – a method to anonymize the source of your bitcoins.

TrueCrypt – Open source application used to encrypt storage devices such as hard drives and USB flash drives. It is also used to create encrypted virtual disks contained in a file that mount similarly to real storage devices. Note: It is depreciated and now veracrypt has taken its place.

Tx ID – Bitcoin transaction ID

Vendors – Those who sell product on a market. This may be of an illegal nature, semi-legal nature, or completely legal nature. Because a vendor will be given a buyer’s full information to send the product to, any new vendor is under heavy scrutiny of being a scam or a ‘honeypot’ set up by law enforcement. Because of the difficult nature of the work, quality vendors tend to develop a cult following.

Vendors Roundtable – A vendor only discussion forum. Used on a site to allow vendors to bring up issues about the market or buyers without raising alarm in the general populace.

VPN – Virtual Private Network. In the context of anonymous activity, this is usually a proxy that purports to be anonymous in nature to hide the end user’s identity. Generally either used to hide the fact that one is connecting to a anonymous network like Tor, or to hide the fact one is using an anonymous network like Tor (as many websites will block Tor outproxies). A VPN does not provide true security as there is no way to know if the operator is keeping logs.

Whonix – (zo7fksnun4b4v4jv.onion) is an Debian based operating system focused on anonymity, privacy and security by isolation. Whonix consists of two parts: One solely runs Tor and is called Gateway. The other, the Workstation, is on a completely isolated network. Only connections through Tor are possible.

Whistleblowing – The disclosure by a person, usually an employee in a government agency or private enterprise, to the public or to those in authority, of mismanagement, corruption, illegality, or some other wrongdoing.

ZULU Time – UTC-0 Western European time zone.