Only two VPN providers that we know of, AirVPN and BolehVPN, offer this service, although neither of these score highly for speeds. Internet traffic first passes through the Tor Network, and then through the VPN. This means the VPN provider doesn’t see your real IP address and the VPN protects you from those bad exit nodes. Again, we can’t emphasize enough that security and anonymity are paramount to those on dark websites.

Best VPNs for the Dark Web in 2026

The dark net is not quite as lucrative as it used to be and the prices for most of these items or services have gone down in recent years. The dark web is infamous as a dangerous place, where drugs are bought and hitmen hired, but it can be a safe way to browse the internet if your privacy is serious concern. Exploring the dark web can seem mysterious, but with the right guidance, it becomes a valuable tool for privacy, security, and uncensored access to information.

• ProPublica is independent, so you’ll find trustworthy news reports on topics ranging from corruption to inequality and environmental issues.
• The Darknet is a subset of the Internet operating over encrypted, anonymous overlay networks that require special software like Tor, Freenet, or I2P.
• Using a virtual private network (VPN) masks your real IP by routing your internet traffic through a secure server, making it appear as though you’re browsing from a different location.
• These assets are often used as initial entry points for ransomware operations.
• The Dutch national police have made their onion site function as a billboard, warning all would-be criminals on darknet marketplaces to think twice about their actions.

Quick Guide: These Are the Best Dark Web Links in 2026

So don’t be surprised if you encounter different versions that claim to be genuine, and be very careful. This is an estimated reading time to let you know how long it will take you to read all the content on this particular PrivacySavvy.com page. However, it has a sneak peek, easy guide steps, and/or a quick list providing quick in-page navigations and easily-found answers if desired.

Onion pastebin

At its core, darknet links serve as gateways to this parallel digital universe, functioning differently from regular web addresses we use daily. What are they exactly, where are they hiding and why can’t regular browsers find anything on the real dark web? In this blog we’ll explore that part of the internet we hope you never access—and show you how to recognize dark web links so you can avoid clicking on them. Wherever you are online, make sure you have trusted software protection to help keep you safer from the not-so-mythical cyber-monsters and online threats lurking there. The Tor Browser stands as the gold standard for accessing darknet links safely.

Keep Tor Browser Updated

ZeroBin has a cool autodestruct feature that makes the message go kaboom (not literally) after the recipient reads it. Since academic research is often fenced off behind paywalls, Sci-Hub aims to democratize knowledge by allowing people to see publicly-funded research for free. A robust antivirus can help block malware and other online threats, even on the dark web.

January’s Top VPN Discounts

• So, without delay, let’s step into the onion patch aka the best 20 dark web websites.
• Tor works by directing internet traffic through a global network of volunteer nodes.
• Tor websites may provide secure access to cryptocurrency wallets and anonymous email clients, and they’re also used to access black market sites.
• SecMail is one of the most popular email services on the dark web.
• Just remember to proceed with caution because you should only use services you feel comfortable with, and that have a low risk of leading to scams or illicit content.
• In addition, nearly everyone has heard stories of drugs and people trafficking or even murders being arranged on the dark net.
• So don’t be surprised if you encounter different versions that claim to be genuine, and be very careful.

It offers features like encrypted communication for chats and file sharing, making it popular with privacy-conscious individuals. Viruses, ransomware, and other types of malware are more common on onion sites than on the normal internet. Many pages have poor encryption standards and no other protections, so simply visiting a Tor site can infect your device. Set Tor Browser’s security level to “Safest” for critical dark web activity.

How to find new, active dark web links

Various browsers and applications offer different levels of protection, each with their own unique features and security protocols. Understanding these differences is crucial for making an informed decision about which tools best suit your needs. Other dark web search engines include Not Evil, Torch, Haystack, and Ahmia. The subreddit r/deepweb is a good starting point for asking more experienced users about how to search the dark web and deep web for the content you want.

What Are Dark Web Links?

But while anonymous email services can help protect your identity, they don’t make you immune to threats like email spoofing or social engineering. And it’s still essential to use strong passwords and two-factor authentication (2FA) to help keep your account secure. In some ways, dark web websites offer more browsing freedom, but the lack of safeguards can leave you exposed to hackers, malware, and other online threats, like viruses or other malware. The lack of regulation leaves the dark web rife with offensive content and unsafe websites. Keybase is an encrypted communication platform that enables secure file-sharing and messaging using public key cryptography. Though not specifically a .onion service, Keybase integrates well with privacy-focused ecosystems like Tor.

Legalities on the use of the Tor network

I especially like how TorLinks categorizes links based on their type, letting you easily find what you need. It’s not illegal per se to access an onion website, but that doesn’t mean your actions while connected to the dark web are immune from law enforcement. It’s still illegal to commit crimes while connected to Tor, regardless of whether or not you think you’ll be caught. Swiss based ProtonMail is an encrypted email service that is quite popular with the cryptocurrency community. It’s a paid service, and while it’s extremely secure you will need another email address to sign up, which can leave traces of your true identity without you realizing. Anyone can archive or retrieve data on any site they want, wherever available.

Additional Links

With 7 years’ experience in tech writing and a knack for practical advice, she helped our readers stay safe online without the jargon. She’s also the kind of person who’ll happily explain encryption over coffee—ideally after a long walk with her dog or a good gym session. Tor hides your IP address, but your ISP can see you’re connected to Tor. Wasabi Wallet is a cryptocurrency wallet that lets you combine multiple cryptocurrencies in one transaction through a coinjoin feature. This adds more anonymity to your transactions as it’s hard to identify where your payments are going — and who they’re going to.

Some nodes and unsafe .onion links have vulnerabilities that can leave you exposed, which means others could track you. You can also be tracked at the entry and exit Tor nodes as your IP address is visible to others. Using dark web .onion sites is legal as long as you avoid illegal activities. Underneath the surface web is the deep web, which is not indexed by regular search engines. This includes pages behind paywalls, your internet banking, and anything else requiring authentication.

• Ultimately, your safety on these sites is your responsibility, so please keep your wits about you as you navigate.
• Links posted to the clear web, in particular, are often malicious.
• To generate these file we will run the voc_label.py script in Darknet’s scripts/ directory.
• Unfortunately, many dark web websites are devoted to the illegal trade of leaked personal information.
• It’s a bit of a contradiction to talk about search engines for dark web sites because, by definition, these are not sites that get indexed by traditional search engines.

The accuracy-oriented approach makes the search engine suitable for concentrated threat intelligence-gathering situations, where quality of result is favored over coverage. It provides a more refined search experience for the users by focusing and upholding quality over quantity, but this may compromise the accuracy of its search results on an omnipresent scale. It operates under maximum anonymity and simplicity, avoiding JavaScript entirely on the premise that they might improve overall security and lower risks of browser fingerprinting. The platform’s promise of no tracking of search history or personalizing of search results fits the bill perfectly for the anonymity requirements of the dark web.

Top 15 Best Ethical Hacking Tools – 2026

The Tor Project created ExoneraTor to let users check whether a specific IP address served as a Tor relay on a given date. Server operators, law enforcement, and academic researchers most commonly use ExoneraTor to identify potential malicious activity on the Tor network. Protonmail offers one of the highest levels of security and privacy for email services, utilizing End-to-End Encryption (E2EE), and operates under Swiss Privacy law. The NYT mirror ensures that its journalism remains accessible in countries where censorship is applied to independent media.

Some popular search engines that can help you explore hidden content and anonymize your web traffic include DuckDuckGo and Ahmia. There are media websites on the dark web—both legitimate and illegitimate—that allow users to access digital media outside the highly monitored surface web. As you might expect, these websites sometimes host explicit, gory, harmful, and illegal content. Hidden, encrypted and out of reach of traditional search engines, the dark web is a place where anonymity rules. Users slip into this shadowy realm using a anonymizing browser, like Tor (The Onion Ring) browser, and a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to protect their identity and secure their connection. Since .onion links aren’t listed and the browser doesn’t have a search engine, you’ll need to know the domain URL you want to visit in advance.

This environment encourages risky behavior and poor judgment over time. WeTheNorth is a region-restricted marketplace that focuses on Canadian and North American buyers and vendors. By limiting sales to domestic channels, the platform reduces customs risks and cross-border enforcement pressure. U.S. Treasury and FinCEN advisories describe how illicit cryptocurrency services help criminals move ransomware and fraud proceeds.

It supports PGP encryption, two-factor authentication (2FA), alerts against fake sites (antiphishing), and a verification system for sellers. Its interface is easy to navigate, and it has a reliable escrow system, as well as allowing payments with Bitcoin and Monero. darknet link All of this has made it one of the most reliable markets still active in 2025. The dark web, an even more puzzling sublayer, exists within this hidden world. It’s designed as an environment to elude detection, where site owners and visitors hide their identities.

Some sites might use these details for advertising, analytics, or tracking your online preferences. SmbCrawler is a credentialed SMB share crawler for red teams that discovers misconfigured shares and hunts secrets across Windows networks. When one goes down, two more emerge with new ideas, better technology, and greater difficulty to track.

• The lack of regulation leaves the dark web rife with offensive content and unsafe websites.
• Riseup is a collaborative organization created by people doing activism to provide secure, encrypted means of communication via the internet and assist in bringing change within society.
• Taking the necessary precautions makes tracing your activities on the dark web difficult.
• For continuous protection, book a demo to see how automated monitoring catches what manual searching misses.
• Torch is the oldest dark web search engine and it has no restrictions when it comes to search engine results.
• The biggest and most frustrating part about dark websites is that they live for a short span of time.
• Feather is a free and open source Monero wallet available on most major computer platforms.
• Sci-Hub serves as the dark web’s version of a massive online library, giving millions of users free access to legally protected academic papers, books, and scientific resources.

The dark web, or the darknet, is a small subset of the deep web. It’s a hidden collective of sites that you could only access through a special browser. Since all activity on the dark web is anonymous by default, it is definitely where the murkiest transactions on the internet take place. A study by researchers at King’s College London that examined the contents of over 2,700 darknet sites found that approximately 60% of them hosted illicit content. The dark web and the deep web are often used interchangeably, but they’re two distinct concepts.

But the truth is the majority of links on The Hidden Wiki are criminal sites, crypto scams, or carry malware. If you live in a country where Tor is legal, it doesn’t mean everything you do on Tor is legal. If you’re there to access illegal dark web porn or trade illicit drugs — it’s obviously not legal.

Usually dark web transactions are made with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. By monitoring known dark web marketplaces, Avast BreachGuard will alert you immediately if and when your data is found. That way, you can change your passwords and lock down your accounts to help block scammers from using your data against you. There are different levels of security in the browser that are worth considering.

Instead, it focuses on publishing stories and holding powerful institutions accountable. Other major news sources blocked in some countries, like the BBC, also have dark web versions. You can access onion sites only through the Tor browser or special network configurations. On the Tor network, the onion domain name reflects the fact that, like the layers of an onion, the Tor browser consists of layers of protection. Tor encrypts traffic, masks your IP address, blocks trackers and browser fingerprinting, and doesn’t store a record of your activity.

DuckDuckGo is the default search engine inside the Tor browser, and once you turn on the Onionize toggle switch in the search box, you’re able to use it to find dark web links. These typically come with “.onion” after them, rather than something like “.com” as on the standard web. Even with Tor and onion routing in place though, you’re not suddenly completely invisible and free to do whatever you want, without repercussions. Certain details of your traffic can be intercepted at the entry and exit points of the node, by the people running those nodes, if they know what they’re doing and what they’re looking for. You’re also open to threats like end-to-end correlation attacks, so while Tor is a lot more secure and private, it’s by no means completely safe. No dark web marketplace is safe to use because they involve illegal activity, financial risk, and potential legal consequences.

The provider also offers a dedicated CyberSec suite that prevents annoying ads and blocks malware and trackers. Also, use an effective antivirus program to check threats if you decide to download files. You can check out this guide on the best antivirus software applications today. If you are in a position to report the incident safely, you should report it to the authorities immediately. It’s recommended not to be too vigilant here and leave the investigation to the professionals. Tor anonymity comes with a cost since malicious hackers and criminals like to operate in the shadows.

Some markets are relatively short-lived (thanks to law enforcement), but others are notorious enough that they survive, for instance, Silk Road, AlphaBay, and Hansa. The good news is that the platform will not see what you copy/paste. Your data is encrypted in the Tor browser before reaching the ZeroBin servers.

• The Tor Browser’s security settings allow disabling JavaScript entirely.
• These concerns are valid because using Facebook undoubtedly exposes users to some of the highest levels of surveillance capitalism anywhere on the web.
• It runs an onion site to help like-minded people mobilize more securely and anonymously.
• The system is designed to provide enhanced security and privacy features.
• Wasabi Wallet is a cryptocurrency wallet that lets you combine multiple cryptocurrencies in one transaction through a coinjoin feature.
• But before we start, install Norton VPN to help protect your digital identity and stay safer online.
• All your traffic is automatically routed through the Tor Network.

To access them, copy and paste the hyperlinks provided into the Tor browser. The dark web is shrouded in mystery, but not every onion website is dangerous. But before we start, install Norton VPN to help protect your digital identity and stay safer online. ProtonMail is a Swiss-based encrypted email service that doesn’t require personal information when you sign up.

However, again, platforms like these are mostly a hotspot for criminals to gather info, trade illegal stuff, and pull off fraud. Authorities closely monitor such platforms, and users risk scams, data theft, legal action, or sudden loss of access if the market is shut down or compromised. With all of that in mind, you need to tread carefully when browsing, in terms of the sites you visit and the other users you interact with. Bear in mind too that laws about freedom of speech and censorship vary from country to country, which is part of the reason the dark web exists in the first place. Even if you’re using a private, anonymized crypto wallet, there are other ways your identity can be revealed—even if it’s something as simple as letting a personal detail slip in an instant message.

ZLibrary hosts free file-sharing access to academic texts, scholarly articles, and general-interest books. It often hosts copyrighted materials without permission, violating many countries’ copyright laws. Downloading or distributing such material is against the law and can have legal consequences.

Tor browsers create encrypted entry points and pathways for the user, so dark web activity remains anonymous. The encryption technology routes users’ data through a large number of intermediate servers, which protects the users’ identity and guarantees anonymity. The darknet version of DuckDuckGo is not a search engine for the dark web, but a private browsing tool for the dark web. DuckDuckGo’s regular site can take you to the dark web, as it brings up onion sites and dark web links when searched. Neither DuckDuckGo’s dark nor normal versions keep a log of your web activity.

In the internet’s darkest corners, a myriad of hidden websites cater to an array of needs and interests. From encrypted communication channels and hacking forums to illicit marketplaces, the dark web is a destination for millions of daily users. Read on to learn more about the five main types of darknet websites and what they contain. In an era defined by digital connectivity, protecting sensitive, critical and personal information from cyber threats – including those originating from the dark web – is a strategic imperative. From information security threats like identity theft and malware to scams and surveillance, navigating the dark web without caution can lead to real dangers.

He has a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Durham University, where he also spent a term as editor of the award-winning student newspaper Palatinate. His journalism career started in print media, where he contributed to and edited several technology magazines and bookazines sold in the U.K. His expertise covers broad areas of consumer tech, including smartphones, laptops, wearables, and AI. Cryptocurrency transactions are analyzed to identify payment patterns and laundering methods. Once wallets are linked to real-world identities, marketplaces lose a key layer of protection.