The dark web’s pre-eminent forum for all things related to darknet markets, Dread, was once again unreachable on Wednesday as a longstanding series of punishing DDOS attacks had been stepped up by unknown adversaries. The latest round of attacks started over the weekend and seem to be having a broader effect on the health of the Tor network as a whole.
Dread admin Paris wrote an explanatory post about the recent attack on Sunday in a thread titled “Another Day Another Tor Attack”, attempting to shed some light on what made this particular attack so effective. “I(t) seems like we are going to need to burn some more money. Yet again Dread/Recon is receiving a large DDOS attack which is killing the guard nodes on our fronts,” wrote Paris. “These attacks are in conjunction with other attacks on the Tor network,” he added, citing an uptick in general latency across the network as evidence of general inaccessibility.
Network performance stats kept by the Tor Project demonstrating a general slowing of the entire Tor network due to persistent DDOS attacks that began in mid-September.
“The Tor network is starting to deteriorate quickly so expect occasional downtime and inaccessibility. Grab a new identity if you get timeout issues on Dread. If you try, it might take a couple minutes, you should still be able to access Dread. After you have successfully built a connection generally it should be solid for 10 minutes time until you need to build another one.” – Paris, Dread admin
According to Paris, Tor guard nodes have been going offline en masse in recent days, making it easier for the attackers to make sites like Dread unreachable. Paris believes the reason for the uptick in the intensity of attacks is due to a “last-ditch attempt” by DDOSers to extort funds from onion site admins as a Proof of Work solution for mitigating them will be added to Tor in the near future. According to a member of darknet market AlphaBay’s staff, that site is also experiencing a heavy DDOS attack; an event currently being shared by a few other markets as well.
Both Dread and AlphaBay are still reachable via the I2P network where connectivity remains unaffected, negating the need for a captcha or other anti-DDOS methods.
Dread is visited by hundreds of darknet market users, online privacy enthusiasts and general researchers on a daily basis. Since 2018, it has been the unofficial gathering place on the dark web for discussion related to darknet markets, cybersecurity, OpSec, cryptocurrency, and a wide array of political and social issues.