After over a week of silence since indicating it was ready for relaunch, Dread admins HugBunter and Paris updated their respective canaries yesterday, Feb. 11th, on the forum’s temporary landing page to specifically address rumors of their capture and/or compromise by law enforcement.
The new messages from the duo are meant to put to rest specifically the rumor that Paris had been arrested by police in France on charges related to the hacking of a psychotherapy center, and that he was a Finnish citizen wanted by Europol named Julius “Zeekill” Kivimaki. Kivimaki is also suspected of being the admin of the Finnish darknet market Spurdomarket, who fled the country to avoid prosecution last year.
“The FUD that I’m a Finnish hacker is just stupid,” wrote Paris in his most recent canary update posted to Dread. “Why the fuck would I, a person who believes in the absolute privacy of people, ever try to hack a Psychotherapy Center and hold it for ransom?”
Latest PGP-signed canary message posted by HugBunter on Dread.
Dread is considered to be the pre-eminent source for darknet market-related news and links, a place where market administrators, staff, vendors, buyers, and casual observers could exchange ideas as well as share information hard to find elsewhere. It has been offline since late November of last year, taken down by its admins to be optimized for mitigating sustained DDOS attacks. The last update of the r/DreadAlert subreddit took place on Jan. 30th, in which HugBunter projected that the site’s much anticipated re-launch was “imminent.”
The failure of Dread to relaunch within a timely fashion since this announcement has left many darknet market users spooked, wary of the circumstances of its admins. Fear among darknet market users has been compounded recently with several markets being offline and DeSnake, admin of AlphaBay, failing to log into his market to fix problems with the market’s 2-FA system.
Regardless of rampant speculation, HugBunter appeared to be unphased in his quest to bring back Dread, taking time off yesterday to publish the following message to the top of the temporary page currently displayed on the forum’s Tor URL:
“Updates are sparse right now intentionally, due to further problems because I tried to rush things and over-simplify the theory behind intended re-writes, we’ve been left with some tough decisions which will make the relaunch potentially a lot less worthy of what I wanted to provide…
I am currently migrating some minor new features/updates into the previous Dread codebase and we will relaunch in the best capacity possible at this time.
I am avoiding Reddit right now due to the cesspit of complaints and FUD, which just provide further headaches for us all. We’re working hard and will restore balance for us all shortly.” – HugBunter on Dread’s system status page, Feb 11