Dread is the largest English-language forum on the Dark Web, modeled after Reddit, and is known for its ongoing focus on the international dark web marketplace, a vital source of truth in a dark web anonymity space rife with scams. As "ODN" reported, the most popular English-language forum on the dark web representing Tor's freedom of expression was taken offline on November 30, 2022, due to a DDoS attack and has yet to be restored.
Dread is the site that has suffered the most DDoS attacks in Tor's history. Because it is the oldest and most reliable source of information in the dark web's crypto market ecosystem, it is a very "critical security infrastructure" for these communities.
In 2020, in order to keep Dread online, their team developed a open-sourced soft named Endgame, their framework for mitigating DDoS on the Tor network, which was publicly released and quickly became the standard used by all major Tor hiding services to stay online.
The recent widespread Tor DDoS attacks have forced many Tor hidden service operators to redesign their servers and code to better defend against the attacks. Some site operators, including the Dread forums, now use alternative privacy technologies such as I2P to host secondary mirrors of their sites.
Typically, Hugbunter and Paris, two administrators on the Dread administration team, post status updates on Reddit's /r/DreadAlert section, and recently, Hugbunter (hugbunt3r) posted an article on Reddit: " Happy new year! We're still here!", which states that there is hope that the Dread forum will return within a week. The details are as follows.
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Hash: SHA512Hi all, happy new year! I hope everyone have enjoyed the holidays and are in good health.
Apologies for the lack of updates over the past month, but both myself and Paris have been working extremely hard to restore service, by means of working on the new server infrastructure to relaunch our platforms on. This has not been an easy task as we had to just pretty much start from scratch without much of the needed planning and jumped right into it at a moments notice. It hasn't been straight
forward and we've ran into many issues to get things right. As of right now, we're about a week out from being able to give a solid ETA on a return of Dread, but I will say we're hopeful of it being next week. This depends on there being no further issues as we finalize everything on the server side and also if I manage to work through some rewrites of the codebase in a timely manner, however it is not an easy or small task so no further pressure please 😉 Achieving the rewrite of the main aspects of the platform and corresponding database structure has been MUCH needed for around 3 years now, our servers have been screaming in pain because of the inefficiencies my rushed code caused. I'm wanting to solve this so we can provide a much more stable platform all around and reduce our overheads significantly.As I've briefly touched on previously, we'll have the DoS attacks "solved" too, for ourselves and any other service who needs assistance, ensuring we are primarily available over Tor again, along side the i2p gateway, which is still recommended going forward and I know many other services are now offering an eepsite too, which is great news as it will give some hope towards complete stability to all related communities and services.
I can promise you with great certainty, the plans I have with the relaunch and also for the near future are going to allow all of us to move forward significantly and we will continue to innovate this space. We are not going anywhere and I still have much to provide and share.
Stay safe!
Hug
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This article by Hugbunter is a verified PGP statement that ensures its reliability and placates the users of the Dread site to wait patiently for their administrators to complete the upgrade.
The dark web v3 site of Dread is currently accessible as normal, and upon visiting the page states: You have reached the Dread Network System Status application. Meanwhile, the page has two announcements revealing the progress of the Dread update and saying it will be back at full speed soon.
The first, published on December 1, 2022, reads
All services are currently offline while we complete migration to an upgraded server infrastructure. No ETA at this time.
The second, published on 2 January 2023, reads
Happy new year! Don't worry, we're still here. The completion of our new infrastructure has been a bumpy process, but not long now until you can all return home. We will be back at full speed very soon.
The dark web address for the Dread forum is: http://dreadytofatroptsdj6io7l3xptbet6onoyno2yv7jicoxknyazubrad.onion
"ODN" will continue to monitor whether the Dread website will be restored as scheduled next week.
Stay tuned to "ODN" for more news on the dark web.