Beyond the Surface Web: Gathering Cyber Intelligence in Overlay Networks

The internet most organisations interact with every day represents only a fraction of the digital environments where threat actors operate. Beneath it lies a more complex landscape — overlay networks, closed communities, and purpose-built infrastructures that are not accessible through a standard browser and are not indexed by conventional search engines. For cyber intelligence teams, understanding and operating within these environments is increasingly essential. Doing so safely, without putting organisational infrastructure at risk, is one of the most significant operational challenges they face.

Understanding the Landscape

Overlay networks are networks built on top of the standard internet but requiring specific software, configurations, or credentials to access. They are not monolithic — each has its own architecture, culture, and purpose — and understanding the distinctions matters for anyone conducting intelligence work within them.

Tor (The Onion Router) is the most widely known overlay network, routing traffic through a series of encrypted relays to anonymise users and host .onion sites that are inaccessible from the standard web. It is home to a significant volume of criminal activity — marketplaces for stolen data, malware, and illicit services — but also to legitimate privacy-focused communities and infrastructure. For cyber intelligence analysts, Tor is often the starting point for dark web research.

I2P (the Invisible Internet Project) operates differently, using a distributed, peer-to-peer architecture that makes it harder to monitor from the outside. It hosts its own internal services — forums, file sharing, messaging — and is increasingly used by threat actors who consider Tor insufficiently anonymous. Accessing I2P requires integration into the network itself, not just a connection to it.

Freenet provides decentralised, censorship-resistant file storage and communication, with content distributed across participating nodes. It is used for the persistent hosting of material that its operators want to make difficult to remove or attribute.

Beyond these established networks, there are invitation-only forums, private Telegram channels, Discord servers operating behind referral gates, and bespoke infrastructure built by specific threat actor groups for their own operational security. These are not overlay networks in the technical sense, but they represent the same challenge: environments that are not openly accessible and that require deliberate, careful entry.

What Intelligence Can Be Gathered

The intelligence value of operating within these environments is substantial. Cyber threat intelligence teams use them to:

• Monitor criminal marketplaces for stolen credentials, compromised infrastructure, and data relating to their own organisation or sector

• Acquire malware samples from sources that are not accessible through conventional channels, enabling analysis before threats become widespread

• Track threat actor activity — the forums, communications, and operational planning that precede attacks and that reveal TTPs not visible in post-incident analysis

• Identify infrastructure being assembled for future campaigns, including command and control servers, phishing kits, and exploit tooling

• Monitor for data leakage — early detection of exfiltrated data appearing in dark web markets before it is weaponised

Each of these activities requires not just access to the relevant environment but a sustained, credible presence within it. One-time access rarely produces actionable intelligence. The value comes from consistent monitoring over time.

The Risk of Getting It Wrong

Operating in overlay networks and dark web environments carries risks that are qualitatively different from standard open source research. The environments themselves are hostile. Malicious actors actively probe visitors for signs of institutional origin. Links lead to malware. Downloads are weaponised. Infrastructure is designed to identify and exploit the curious as much as to serve the community.

For organisations that attempt this work using corporate infrastructure, the risk is not hypothetical. A device that connects to a Tor hidden service while also connected to a corporate VPN, or that downloads a malware sample onto a machine with access to organisational systems, creates exposure that can cascade rapidly. The same infrastructure that analysts are trying to study can be turned against the organisation conducting the research.

The consequences extend beyond technical compromise. An organisation whose research activity is identified — through a device fingerprint, a network pattern, or a persona linked back to a known institution — loses the intelligence access it was trying to build, potentially alerts the subjects of its research, and may find itself the target of retaliatory activity.

Networks Within Networks

One of the more demanding aspects of dark web intelligence work is the layered nature of the environments where the most valuable information resides. The publicly accessible parts of Tor or I2P represent the outer layer. The communities that matter to cyber intelligence analysts — the closed forums, the vetted marketplaces, the private channels — exist several layers deeper, behind referral requirements, vetting processes, and reputation systems that take time and credibility to navigate.

Getting into these environments requires more than a working Tor browser. It requires identities with history, reputations built over time, and the ability to participate convincingly in communities whose members are themselves experienced at identifying outsiders. The infrastructure supporting that work needs to be as sophisticated as the environments being accessed.

How Kuro Supports Dark Web Intelligence Operations

Kuro is built to support exactly this kind of work — safely, at scale, and without putting organisational infrastructure at risk.

Analysts access dark web and overlay network environments through virtual devices that are entirely isolated from corporate infrastructure. There is no connection between the research environment and the organisation's systems — no shared network, no persistent storage, no risk of lateral movement if a device encounters malicious content. When a research environment is retired, it is gone. Nothing persists that could create future exposure.

Virtual mobile identities and clean network egress allow analysts to build and maintain personas appropriate to the environments they are operating in — with the history, behavioural consistency, and network characteristics needed to access communities that vet their members. Kuro supports the patient, sustained work that dark web intelligence requires, not just one-time access.

For organisations acquiring malware samples or conducting technical analysis of threat actor infrastructure, Kuro's isolated environments provide a safe container for that work — artefacts can be handled, analysed, and disposed of without any risk to the wider organisational estate.

The governance and auditability framework that applies across Kuro's platform applies equally here. Every access, every action, and every piece of collected material is logged within a controlled environment, ensuring that intelligence gathered in these sensitive contexts can be defended — operationally, legally, and under regulatory scrutiny.

The Capability Gap Most Organisations Have

Most organisations conducting cyber threat intelligence work have some visibility of the surface web and the more accessible parts of the dark web. Few have the infrastructure and operational discipline to go deeper — into the closed communities, the private channels, and the layered networks where the most actionable intelligence resides.

That gap is not primarily a skills problem. The analysts exist. It is an infrastructure problem. Without environments designed for this kind of work, the risk of operating in hostile digital territory falls on individual analysts and on organisational systems that were never designed to absorb it.

Kuro closes that gap — providing the secure, governed, scalable infrastructure that allows cyber intelligence teams to operate where the intelligence is, without bringing the risk home with them.

Kuro supports lawful intelligence and investigative research for government agencies, law enforcement, journalistic and accredited private sector organisations. All use of the platform is subject to Kuro's Acceptable Use Policy and applicable legal frameworks.