The dark web is an area of the internet that’s not accessible using regular commercial browsers. It is most notoriously known for the illegal activity it facilitates. However, for online investigators, the dark web can be a tremendous resource for gathering information, researching their adversaries and following up on threat indicators.
Before we had the popularity of Meta’s Facebook messenger and end-to-end encryption apps like Telegram, there was AOL Instant Messenger (AIM for short). AIM was brilliant, and from my high school to college years, it was the preferred method of staying in touch with my friends. With the success of AIM, there were competitors: Yahoo Messenger and MS Messenger, and while not comparative in the popularity of AIM (here in the United States at least), both services had their own features which set them apart.