Prague, Jan 19 (CTK) – Interest in darknet, where one can order weapons, drugs and contract killers, has sky-rocketed in the Czech Republic up to the current roughly 13,000 accesses a day, five times the figure from 2011, daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) writes yesterday.
The dark hidden layer of Internet, the paradise of 21st century thieves, works thanks to anonymous access through coded networks, MfD writes.
Getting access to darknet is nothing complicated. All one needs is to have one of the special browsers installed and one can easily enter the “market” from which the goods can be sent to an anonymous P.O. box, MfD writes.
Thousands of Czechs are doing this on a daily basis, it adds.
The real figures may be even higher than the recorded numbers, MfD writes.
“Accesses to darknet from the Czech Republic are only those where people identify themselves as being from there,” cyber crime expert Vladimir Smejkal is quoted as saying.
“Those who want to keep secret their identity absolutely use the access via various servers so that one cannot find out from where they are,” Smejkal said.
The record number of accesses to darknet is in the USA. It has reached some 400,000 a day, MfD writes.
Although even 15,000 Czech visitors a day may sound marginal, the Czech Republic is a big player in darknet, it adds.
“Czechs are a power with regard to the use of technologies associated with darknet,” expert Jiri Slaby, from Deloitte company, is quoted as saying.
“When it comes to the hosted ‘exit nodes’ in the Czech Republic, it is one of the top countries. These are the servers through which the communication path of all users of a given network leads,” he adds.
Deloitte took part in an analysis of the Czech trace in darknet conducted last December, MfD writes.
Czech customs authority statistics and the number of uncovered consignments at post offices and the customs office at the Ruzyne airport bear witness of a large-scale dealing in drugs and in recent years especially in anabolic steroids, MfD writes.
Although customs officers now only find a small number of consignments with hard drugs, the number of anabolic steroids with hormonal effect is rapidly growing, it adds.
“The number of the cases we pass to the police as there is suspicion of crime has been growing by the year,” Martina Kankova, spokeswoman for the Customs Administration of the Czech Republic, is quoted as saying.
“In 2014, there were 61 cases, but last year 67 ,” Kankova said.
“The number of cases involving substances with anabolic or hormonal effects rose from 28 in 2014 to 34 in 2015,” she added.
