NordVPN adheres to a strict no-logs policy, which has been twice verified by independent auditors. This allows you to use public WiFi privately and without fear of hacking. There’s no chance of your real IP address leaking, while it benefits from some of the fastest speeds on the market. The VPN offers Tor over VPN features and an advanced Catapult Hydra tunneling protocol in its free plan, which helps in navigating the dark web safely.
Dangers Of Accessing The Dark Web
- Surfshark’s MultiHop (its version of double VPN) offers 12 preconfigured options.
- Many dark websites are perfectly legal and safe to use and, in many cases, are better for your privacy than clear websites.
- We stress-tested it using Tor over VPN, then flipped it and ran VPN over Tor, both held up without any weird breaks or traceable info.
- Not every free VPN is good, so only a few reliable free VPNs exist that help in accessing the infamous part of the deep web.
- The Tor Browser is the most popular browser for the dark web, but other popular options exist, like Brave, Comodo Dragon, Epic and SRWare Iron.
- It’s the best cheap VPN right now, offering a fully-featured (and massively secure) VPN service at a fraction of the cost of other premium-level providers.
A few VPNs offer Onion over VPN servers, which make it possible for you to visit .onion websites on different browsers. It saves your IP address, ISP, mobile phone number, GPS location, and more unnecessary data. This information can be used to analyze your online activity and can be dangerous if leaked. Services like Random Chat connects you with random people using the same service. All you’ll need is an 8GB thumb drive, an installation package, and a couple of minutes to get things up and running.
But The Right Free VPNs? We Found Them
A kill-switch and DNS leak protection make browsing secure, and the service comes backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee. It offers a secure service with a bespoke client that can be used on up to six devices simultaneously. It is a no-logs VPN service that has servers in over 50 countries around the world. And, it provides a kill switch, obfuscation (stealth) and VPN over Tor (setup manually using a guide on its website by connecting with the third party OpenVPN software). Banks and identity theft protection services routinely monitor dark web marketplaces for their customers’ personal details, for example.
Cloudwards Editor’s Choice: NordVPN
So, even though it does exist on the internet, Google doesn’t index any of these pages or content. Google considers the majority of the content on the entire web highly irrelevant and useless to its users. That’s why such a large percentage (as much as 94%) of the entire web is not returned in Google Search.
How To Access The Dark Web Safely And Securely
Above all, they’re unlimited bandwidth-wise, enabling you to soar the darknet without thinking twice about restrictions. With so much to see on this part of the internet, we believe traffic limits are the last thing your heart desires. We also need to point out that, unlike ProtonVPN and Hide.me, PrivadoVPN has no third-party audits. This is properly highlighted in our test of PrivadoVPN where we reviewed its free version. If you’re expecting simultaneous connections, you’re in for disappointment.
Notes From The Lab: CyberGhost Speed Test Results
Besides the off-putting logo and app design, Darkweb VPN itself is a mystery and cannot be trusted with your IP address and online traffic. We don’t recommend Hotspot Shield Basic for Tor because it logs too much data and shares information with third-party advertisers. When you’re done surfing or shopping on the dark web, don’t forget to shut down Tails. The major advantage of using a live OS such as Tails is that, on shut down, the OS wipes itself from the thumb drive you’ve installed it.
What Is Streaming And How Does It Work?
Free VPNs tend to be less secure as they don’t have the advanced privacy and network protection features you can find in premium services. The Tor-VPN combination is the best way to access the dark web, ensuring you’re entirely safe and private. That way, not even your ISP can detect that you’re accessing the dark web or using the Tor server. For most online users, the dark web and darknet primarily draw up associations of illegal activities and dangerous websites. While this is true to an extent, the dark web is much more than that. Add specific websites and IP addresses to avoid censorship and remain anonymous online.
Alternative Anonymous Networks
Private Internet Access is an open-source VPN service, a fact that makes pairing it with Tor for dark web browsing even more enjoyable. You can rely on complete transparency with PIA and even inspect the code in its apps if you want to. ExpressVPN is based in the privacy-friendly British Virgin Islands. And, like any other VPN worth its salt, it has a no-nonsense no-logs policy. You can also buy an ExpressVPN subscription with Bitcoin, so you don’t leave any trace when paying for it. Surfshark has over 3,200 servers in 100 countries, with at least 1 Gbps port available on every server.
For the most security-conscious, you can even install the Tails operating system on a flash drive and run Tor from that. Its main appeal is that it offers more privacy and supports legacy Firefox add-ons. It also eliminates data collection, telemetry, and other suspicious code modern web browsers tend to use, which are troubling at best. Although it requires more work, it provides tech-savvy users with a more familiar interface with better security for accessing Tor through a proxy.
Proton VPN has decent connection speeds and has tools for giving long-distance connections a bump. Its VPN Accelerator distributes the CPU load between multiple processes in OpenVPN, and modifies the servers’ Linux stacks to shorten the normal packet processing path. Moreover, Hola VPN logs sensitive user information, including Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and web browsing details. So, avoiding Hola VPN for any online activity is advisable, as it may compromise your privacy and security.
We test each product thoroughly and give high marks to only the very best. We are independently owned and the opinions expressed here are our own. We’d like to hear about it, and as always, thank you for reading.
It can reach over 90% of unprotected speeds on near-distance connections, but the speeds can fall below 20% on its slowest days. However, since it has inconsistent download speeds, it might not be the best for downloading files on the dark web. The upload speeds are more consistent and may suit users looking to upload files to dark websites. Mullvad is easy to use partly because of its simplistic design and partly because the features are a bit bare. The features are well organized in the settings menu for easy access and come with descriptions of how they work to guide new users.
Tails always starts with a clean slate and any evidence of the activities you engage in while using Tails disappears when you shut down Tails. This includes evidence of any websites you visit, files you open, passwords you use, and even any other devices or networks you connect to. Tails never writes anything to the computer’s hard drive, running only from the RAM of the computer, which is wiped clean when the computer is shut down. Users who wish to gain access to such information are protected by the same anonymity the publishers of the content enjoy. Well-known news websites, such as ProPublica, have launched deep websites.
