This course is a practical tutorial on how to use the darknet. First, you’ll get an understanding of the inner workings of each topic and each technique covered. Then, you’ll learn how to apply it in real-life scenarios, ultimately teaching you how to use the darknet and the clear net in a private, anonymous, and secure manner. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to combine the skills you learned and apply best practices to your everyday use of the internet.

This course covers four main topics:

Anonymity: You’ll learn several techniques to improve your anonymity; you’ll first know what the TOR network is, understand how it works and how it can significantly enhance our anonymity, then you’ll learn how to connect to it using the TOR Browser, using TAILS and using Qubes OS, you’ll also learn how to configure TOR properly to bypass censorship and secure even if it’s blocked.

Privacy: Using an anonymizing network such as TOR is not enough to stay private and anonymous because the operating systems we use (Windows, OS X, Linux) constantly collect data about us, therefore in this course, you’ll learn how to use two operating systems designed to be more private, more anonymous and more secure; TAILS and Qubes OS, you’ll learn how to install these operating systems on a USB stick so you can use them on any computer without affecting the original operating system and without leaving any traces!
There is a complete section on encryption in which you’ll learn how the two main types of encryptions work. What is end-to-end encryption, and how to use it? How to encrypt/decrypt, and sign/verify data; this allows you to communicate and share any data privately, whether it is simple text or files such as images and videos, without worrying about it being intercepted.

Dark Net: This is the section on the internet that is not indexed by search engines and requires particular configuration to access. Using anonymizing networks and privacy-focused operating systems are two steps in the right direction of becoming more private and more anonymous. Still, unfortunately, it is not enough, the services we use every day are not private and constantly collect data about us, so the search engines (Google or Bing), the email provers (ex: Gmail, or Yahoo), the instant messaging platforms (WhatsApp or Skype), the file-sharing services (Dropbox or Google Drive) of these services are not private, not anonymous and can be used to track us and de-anonymize us.

Security: All of the above will drastically enhance your anonymity and privacy and allow you to access both the dark web and the clear web privately and anonymously, but if you get hacked, the hacker will gain control over your system and therefore will be able to easily bypass whatever anonymity techniques you’re using and de-anonymize you, so all of the above is useless without security.