Quote Originally Posted by PoppaGeek View Post

I forget not everyone reads security and network articles and keeps up with what goes on in the dark net. I suppose some do not even know what the dark net is.
That really depends on who you're talking to. The "dark net" is data that is connected, but cannot be found by public search engines. An example is data hidden behind company extranet search pages. Google, yahoo etc can't touch it, you have to go in through the company internal search engine. Some has enormous amounts of data available if you know what search terms to use. Companies have gotten better at making private information inaccessible to the public, but not everyone takes their security responsibilities seriously enough.
The "warez" community like to think of themselves as the "dark net", but they're misappropriating the term (probably because it sounds ominous) just like the media bastardized the term "hacker" (really just someone who deeply understands stuff and makes it do novel things it wasn't designed to do) in the 80s.