Due Diligence Investigations and the World Wide Web

What is due diligence?

Due diligence is the analysis of persons or businesses for the determination of their credibility, typically for a legal transaction or partnership. The process of performing a due diligence investigation typically starts with searches on the World Wide Web. When discussing with a Client regarding the scope of an investigation, it is important to understand some key terms and limitations related to digital searches.

What is the World Wide Web?

The World Wide Web (WWW) may be defined as the information system where documents and web resources are indexed and rendered searchable. While the terms World Wide Web and the Internet are often used interchangeably, they are categorically distinct from one another.

The internet is the network used to connect digital devices and share information with one another. In contrast, the World Wide Web is an application. It is the infrastructure that runs on the internet and converts information on webpages into digestible content.

The World Wide Web is, "the part of the internet accessed through a graphical user interface and containing documents often connected by hyperlinks". - Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Surface Web

The Surface web is the part of the World Wide Web that is accessible to the general public. These are pages that are indexed (crawled) by web crawlers and which may be accessed by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

Surface Web example: This website. Access to this website is indexed by Google and other search engines so that it may be rendered accessible to the public.

In terms of due diligence investigations, running a Google search on a given person or business will provide only 'surface' level results. These results are the easiest to access; however, an investigation should not stop at the surface level.

According to one estimate, only 5% of all content hosted on the World Wide Web and shared on the internet can be accessed by search engines alone. Effective due diligence will require you to go deeper...

Deep Web

The Deep Web is the portion of the World Wide Web that is not indexed by web crawlers. This layer constitutes that largest portion of the World Wide Web and contains an estimated 95% of all content posted to the internet.

Information on the Deep web Is not found by most search engines because it is stored in database systems which are not coded in HTML formats. You may use Google, Yahoo, or Bing to identify the site that contains the deep web content; however, a simple google search is not enough to retrieve the contents contained therein.

Deep Web example: Government Databases, FEC Filings, UCC Databases, Digitized Court Records.

The Deep web contains most of the information that is of interest to private investigators. It is at this level of research that you may retrieve the high quality information on your subject of investigation. All due diligence investigations should start with both Surface web and Deep web searches.

Dark web

Th Dark web is the deepest layer of the web. Dark web content exists on darknets which are defined as overlay networks within the internet that can only be accessed with specific software or authorizations. There are two typical types of darknet web content: social networks and anonymity proxy networks such as TOR.

People often conflate the deep web with the dark web, but they are entirely distinct from one another. Whereas deep web typically pertains to commercial or public database content that is not indexed by search engines, the dark web pertains to web hosted content that require anonymity networks to access. The dark web will often bring you in association with content that is deliberately designed to be difficult to access as privacy is an essential feature of these network types.

Dark Web Example: SilkRoad, Agora, DeepBay.

Conclusion

A key part of successful Due Diligence is the determination of what needs to be discovered. Start your searches right by knowing how and where to search for information.

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