Dread admin HugBunter recently provided some insight into when his darknet markets forum will be back up and running, summarizing progress made on its restoration in a PGP-signed message in the r/DreadAlert subreddit on Saturday, Jan 21st. In the message HugBunter said that the forum “should be online within the next week,” which would suggest Jan 28th at the latest. He also suggested that there would be no more updates from himself or co-admin Paris before the relaunch was completed.
Dread is visited by hundreds of DNM users on a regular basis and is seen as a trustworthy focal point for market links and information. The famed forum was taken offline completely at the end of Nov 2022 so it could be retooled by its admins to make it more robust against the efforts of a persistent DDOS attacker.
The unnamed attacker rendered Dread unreachable for days or even weeks at a time throughout last year and is apparently the same individual responsible for knocking several darknet markets offline, who apparently refused to give in to their extortion demands.
The system status page currently replacing Dread’s landing page as it undergoes reconfiguration.
Sounding weary yet determined to complete the task at hand, HugBunter described on Reddit in moderate detail the challenges involved with getting Dread back online. Such challenges include rebuilding the forum and its underlying architecture in a manner that allows it to retain a high level of security while making it more resistant against future DDOS attacks.
“On the infrastructure side, we’ve faced many setbacks with configuring things as we’ve needed, which is also very different to our previous cluster setup,” wrote HugBunter on Reddit. “You can plan everything, and something can go wrong somewhere which puts a halt to any progress. This has been the case many times already during this infrastructure overhaul, with the most recent unforeseen issue mostly wiping current progress,” he added.
Dread’s co-admin Paris has also been keeping forum users updated on progress, writing in a canary update for the forum on Jan. 20th that he had “finally fixed the problem with the (server) cluster” and that he and HugBunter would “get things up again ASAP.”