Onion Harvester: Second Generation

I’ve started a project named Onion Harvester for finding the Onion addresses in TOR hidden services which are not exposed by the owners. I believe that the real dark markets and interesting stuff of TOR networks relies in the dark.

Dark Market?

I was always curious about what are the dark markets and what’s going there? If the Internet is transparent, how criminals can work over the Internet? So a search engine for TOR would be OK. But for starting a complete search engine, you must know all the addresses and the point to begin.

Motivation

After that I’ve meet with Anonymous Networks such as TOR, Invisible Internet Project, FreeNet, Tribler, and etc. And I’ve heard about Operation Onymous, which make me excited about how they found the markets Onion links. Some markets were famous such as Silk Road. But I always think that how one could find all the addresses?

The Experience

I was curious that indexed urls in famous Hidden Service Indexers such as thehiddenwiki are truly sell illegal stuffs or they are swindlers? You may use some hidden network search engines like Ahmia.fi or TORCH.

I’ve found some Onion addresses. One of them was live killing operation for killing someone online. If it was true, it would be a sin! So I opened the Onion Address and it a counter in the screen showing 3 days remain to start live torturing and killing! It asked about 0.01 BTC, I can’t remember exactly, for watching the killing operation.

After 3 days, I’ve again checked the onion address and it said that after 3 days we will kill a person live! I’ve checked the HTML source code and I’ve found that it is a simple script for displaying the counter statically. I cannot verify that the killing was done or not (I did not pay), but strongly I guess that the static script was done by a swindler.

Onion Harvester Born …

I’ve started developing the OH project and released the first version in Dec 2017. But the speed was not satisfactory. I published the paper about the OH in APA3 Conf, Zahedan, Iran.

But I could not get the practical way to solve the issue. After that, I started to use of multiple TOR instance in a single PC instead of only one instance and the result was SUCCESSFUL!

Then I re-implemented the Onion Harvester and make it more arranged (MVP, some design patters, some improvements, use of multiple TOR instance).

You may visit the project at my GitHub repository.

Any comment or contribution is appreciated.