Almost all Internet users have heard of the darknet. It is there that stolen files, user database drains and illegal software are sold on trading platforms. At the same time, many confuse the darknet, deep web and almost no one knows exactly when the deep or dark Internet appeared.

Editorial office of AIN.UA figured out how the Shadow Network appeared, and what can be found in it.

How the “Shadow Network” appeared

The shadow network appeared even earlier than the Internet that we are using now and, accordingly, exists even longer than it.

In the 1970s, the Office of Advanced Research Projects of the US Department of Defense (also known to many as DARPA — Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) was engaged in the creation of the ARPANet network (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), which became the progenitor of today’s Internet

The primary task of ARPANet was to unite a network of research and military institutes in the United States, to increase the speed and improve the convenience of information exchange between them. And even then, the US military realized the need to create an isolated network inside the public ARPANet. For this purpose, special nodes were created that could receive data from ARPANet, but did not appear in the lists of networks and did not respond to requests from outside.

There is practically no information about what this protected network of the Ministry of Defense was used for and whether ordinary employees of universities connected to the Internet knew about it. But just as ARPANet was the progenitor of the Internet in its usual sense, so this secret network became the ideological progenitor of today’s darknet.