2nd Annual Virginia Cybersecurity Education Conference

Comprehensive cybersecurity education requires an understanding of all threats from all areas of the Internet, including Dark Web. To date, only two Virginia universities teach a structured, formal class on the Dark Web, primarily due to concerns of network and student safety, as well as misconceptions about the nature of the space.

This presentation provides an overview of two different teaching approaches to the Dark Web, detailing the project-based learning techniques used as instructional content in each, as well as the main lessons learned. Both classes covered the basics of the Dark Web and what secondary literature has revealed about the content. For the project-based segments of the course, each course employed a different approach. One approach, conduct in the course at James Madison University, utilized organized search and analysis methods employing the Tor Browser. This provided students with a guided ethnographic-style tour of Dark Web content, which emphasized the development of student familiarity with the Tor browser and .onion addresses. The second course, hosted at Virginia Tech, employed commercial analytics software, providing students with a less proximate but more broad-based understanding of available Dark Web content. Both courses emphasized the use of real Dark Web data to analyze cybersecurity threats, broadly defined.