Dark Web Documentary 01 Getting Setup with Tails Linux

Hi, and welcome back to another YouTube video. I'm just kidding. That thing is so stupid. Hi. Hello. How's it going, everybody? Welcome to another YouTube video. I'm excited about this one. I think this one should be a little bit of fun. I want to get started with a new video series. But hey, this is an artistic, scientific, and educational documentary. Look, I'm going to be transparent. I'm going to put in my disclaimer. Obviously, this is all for education's sake. So I've had the idea to do this sort of thing, to record a video like this and many more to come in a series for quite some time, but I wasn't sure if it's something that I really wanted to do because there is a weird element of risk, I guess, in this. But no, I want to put the stake in the ground. Like, look, this is solely for education's sake. It's to show people that there is stuff out there like this that exists and anyone can go track it down. Anyone can go see it if you have the stomach for it and the know-how and you do it. Look, this stuff is totally accessible. So in this video series, I want to explore the dark web. And I don't want to make it like the cringy, like high-level fluff that you see in other videos. You know, my style and what I like to do with my videos is that it's a raw, genuine screen capture. It's the footage and pure recording of what I'm seeing on my computer screen. So that's what I want to bring to you while we explore and look around the dark web. So this will be very similar to the malware analysis stuff in that it's kind of exploratory. I don't know where I'm going. It's just for showcasing's sake. And obviously, I'm not going to get into the like actual dark stuff like morally or ethically wrong or anything that's way too sensitive to show. And I don't want to. And you shouldn't want that to begin with. So look, I want to be showcasing this in the strict sense of cyber security to raise awareness and have the transparency and shine the spotlight on the stuff that's real. So if you happen to, I don't know, play along, look, the biggest thing is kind of your safety. And I don't mean to offer any pretense that, oh, this stuff is obviously safe and secure. So your mileage may vary. I will put in whatever disclaimers are necessary. Like, look, I don't want to be held accountable like for anything that either might go your way or my way. It's, look, I don't even know what I'm saying because it's so hard to capture this. But I want to kind of shine the spotlight on like the underground industry of stuff like, hey, the cyber crime, bad actors, malware, ransomware, hacker for hire services, and stuff like that. I just want to show that to you and that it's a real thing. And I want to give you the real thing, not just the high-level talk about it. So let's do it. Before I dive in, look, obviously, as I said, there's kind of a weird risk in kind of me doing this thing. So, hey, if you, the audience, if you as a single person happen to be a bad dude, if you're a cyber criminal and you're like, oh, that John guy, he's putting me on blast here. You want to come after me? Hey, please don't. And, you know, we're going to keep this fun. We're going to keep it lighthearted. And I hope to approach this stuff with like a level head. I want to be like, I don't know. I don't want this to be the fear, uncertainty, and doubt showcasing of the spooky, scary dark web. First of all, the dark web and the deep web, gosh, I hate those words. Can we stop calling it the dark web? It just sounds so dumb. Anyway, we're going to get into some Tor hidden services and all that. So let's, I guess, get started. I'll hop over to my computer screen here and we'll get set up to go in a little dark web safari. All right. I'm going to get started going over to my web browser, kind of on my host machine. I did mention that kind of the biggest thing that I want to be concerned about with us getting started is our security, like our own safety, our own privacy. So I think the number one choice to kind of get us moving in that regard is working with an operating system and actual like, okay, set up for our computer that is going to have that privacy and anonymity in mind. So I'm looking at Tails Linux, the Linux distribution called Tails that is the amnesic incognito live system that's meant to be kind of ran as an operating system that you boot to, that you have installed kind of on a USB drive or USB stick where you're going to end up using the computer, but solely through that specific operating system partition that you'll might end up using to then browse the web or do things on your computer that will be gone and no longer exist because it's not going to have that persistent file system and persistent hard drive that whence you restart that computer. So Tails is kind of what we will go ahead and opt for. If I were Googling for that, you can see the website here. Tails is a portable operating system that protects against surveillance and censorship. Scrolling down here, checking out their website, it's a lot of really cool stuff. Of course, you've got some big players offering some testimonials in here. The Tor project, right, that we'll get into in just a little bit, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. So Tor and Tails is definitely what we want to end up using. For folks that watch my other videos, you know that I tend to run Windows on my host computer, on my desktop PC that I'm using right now to record. I have Linux installed kind of on all my laptops. And when I'm on my desktop, I will use Linux like Ubuntu Linux in a virtual machine, which is where I record Capture the Flag videos or programming tutorials or malware analysis, stuff like that. So I have been working and I've been playing with Tor in my Ubuntu virtual machine. And I realized, I don't know if I want to do that, especially when I'm putting this out and showcasing it to you. I want to kind of go one step further. And we'll do this solely within a temporary ephemeral operating system inside a virtual machine. So let's install Tails for a virtual machine right here. So I'll go ahead and get Tails here. We'll start that download. And this should take just a moment or two. It's only about a gig. But that is what we'll end up using. And I'll spin this up in VirtualBox. You could use whatever, I guess, virtual machine provider you would like, VMware, VMware Player, if you're working with the free version. I'm just a plebe. I'm just a poor boy and a peasant in VirtualBox. But that's how I'll get started. So I'll go ahead and let this download. And I'll tune back once it is finished. Okay, the Tails ISO has finished downloading. So now I'm going to get started with VirtualBox, or my virtual machine provider. And I'll go ahead and create a new virtual machine. Great. I'll call this Tails. And it will end up running Linux. I'm totally fine with whatever it chooses. I'll give it, I guess, like eight gigs of RAM. And the 12 gigabyte file size is totally fine. I realize this is kind of small text, and I can't easily zoom in on this. But once that is kind of defined and created, if I were to go ahead and click Start, now I could go ahead and choose that ISO file. So I will browse to a specific location, which I know we put it in our downloads. I have this saved and stored already for me in an ISOs folder that I have kind of dedicated to host and let my ISO files live there for anything else that I might use, whether it's Kali Linux, or a Windows image, or Ubuntu, etc. I would recommend doing that, especially for Tails, since we are kind of going to be booting from that ISO file just about each time. So let me go ahead and start that. And VirtualBox will get started. We can hit Enter once we click into the virtual machine. So we'll know we'll boot to Tails. And I will try and make this a smidge bigger here. But I don't think it will be able to display until it finishes booting. So I'll give it a few seconds. And if you're following along, you can do the very same. I'll tune back in once this is done starting up. Okay, looks like he's coming to life here. Looks like it's going to ask me what language I want to work in. My keyboard layout and English is all fine for me. So if I click on Start Tails, it should bring me to my desktop environment in just a moment. I can see my cursor has changed. And at this point, we should be okay to kind of resize the screen here. Yeah, you can see it will map and follow along with us. If I were to maximize this, we're slowly coming to life here. And there we go. Okay, so now we are in Tails. I'll hit my Windows or host key, which I'd have mapped to the right control button. And now I am in that full screen actual Tails virtual machine here. If I click over on the top left, I can hit the Applications button here in this menu. And we can get to our favorites. Tor is already installed and already set up for us. That's kind of the benefit of Tails. And then it might feel like Kali Linux in a way like, oh, all the tools that you would expect to use for this specific purpose. Kali Linux is all about like offensive penetration testing, red teaming, bug bounty, etc. Capture the flag. It looks like it's whining about a signing key. I'm totally cool with that. Tails obviously being fine-tuned and tailored to privacy and anonymity and security and confidentiality. Tor is already set up. Looks like we have Mail Client, KeePass, or Password Manager, Pidgin for instant messaging, etc, etc. And if you wanted to bump around here, you could check out other tools that you might already have installed. I see GIMP is in here, Inkscape. Kind of nice. But obviously, we know what we're doing. We know that we want to hop into the Tor browser. And this will take a little bit of time to get started because Tor is going to end up, you know, working through whatever nodes that it needs to work through to actually make sure that your connections are at least routed in different ways. And I'll have to put a disclaimer. And they're like, sure, using Tor, there's an element of security there. There's a better, more layers of what your connections. That's not to say that this is foolproof, right? When you're worried about your connection to the internet being monitored or being accessible and something that someone else can listen in on, sure, Tor adds extra layers of security. But I don't want to make the proclamation that, oh, no one can break in, no one can see that traffic. It's still, I'm more than positive, can still kind of be, have a little bit of eavesdropping in some places in some ways. So here we are, the tails, opening up the web browser here. But there are a lot of different things we could do. Now we could access onion sites, or those strange domains and websites that have a lot of random characters and have a hidden address with a .onion kind of domain prefix. And that's where the interesting stuff is going to end up being on the dark web, the stupid name. So we'll explore a lot of that in upcoming videos. But for now, note that you can use Tor to access regular websites on the clear net or whatever. And then any of those onion websites or those Tor hidden services. So we'll dive into those in a moment. But I think I want to be able to showcase something for us because I want to show that duality between going to a clear net site, and then a potential, like actual dark net dark website. Facebook is kind of a prime example. And that Facebook sure has its own clear, like regular address facebook.com. But there is also a Facebook onion site. I'm going to end up searching for that we're using DuckDuckGo as our browser here. And it looks like Facebook, the search engine DuckDuckGo, sorry, I realized I said browser, and that's the wrong word here. Facebook core www.onion is a site that allows access to Facebook through the Tor protocol using its .onion top level domain. Kind of slick. So this is just one example. But if I were to go to that Facebook core www.onion, it should bring me to Facebook, just accessed through Tor, and using kind of the secure, bumping around different routers and getting the protocol that we might need so that we aren't as easily tracked. And that is a good thing for us, because we're going to be looking at some weird, shady stuff over here in the dark web. And we can access those .onion top level domain websites, and those specific hidden services Tor hidden services. So I think that's enough for now. We're just getting our feet wet, we're just getting set up. But in the next video, we can take this a little bit further and start to navigate around the dark web, right? Going on this dark web safari, we're putting in the spotlight, we're seeing what we can see, and we're making it real. We're not just throwing like video overlays and effects over it. I hope this is something that can be kind of cool and kind of interesting. And you'll, I'm positive, we'll go down some interesting rabbit holes in here. So hey, thanks so much for tuning in, everybody. Please let me know what you think of this style of video. If, if this is going to be something that you're interested in, I want to know because I have a lot of ideas, a lot of plans for stuff to do with this sort of video series. But I do need that feedback, I do need to know if this is something that you're interested in just as well. But I hope my goal with this sort of thing is not to be too close to the line. It's not to get into that spooky, scary stuff. It's not to do anything about that or even touch or go remotely near the actually dark and very dark stuff that can be seen in the corners and crevices of the internet right now. And I don't want you to go into that. So I'm not making any claims or promises about okay, safety, security. This is all just for education, showcasing, and the exploration of what we can see and how anyone can see this if you really, really wanted to. But that's it. That's enough of me yapping in this video. I'm excited for the next one. I'm excited for what more we can do. Please let me know what you think. Do those YouTube algorithm things like comment and subscribe. I'll see you guys in the next video. Take care.