Several darknet markets remained unreachable via Tor as of the morning of Friday, Dec. 30th, with many seeming to have succumbed to the work of a persistent DDOS attacker who is believed to have also rendered the Dread forum largely unreachable. Dread, which voluntarily went offline at the end of November, has yet to return from an indefinite hiatus in which admins Paris and HugBunter said they are moving the website to a new server with modifications designed to handle the attacks.
According to dark.fail, a relatively trusted darknet market link aggregator which was marked as updated on Friday morning UST, almost every major market was unreachable on Tor, including AlphaBay, Abacus, ASAP, Incognito, Tor Market, Tor2Door, and Bohemia. Cannabia, the recently-launched cannabis-focused sister market of Bohemia, was also offline. Independent research verified that Archetyp currently remains online via Tor, along with smaller markets such as Royal Market, Ares, and Kerberos Marketplace.
PGP-signed message by Dread co-admin Paris, posted to Reddit from Tor.
In the Marketplace Monday thread on r/darknet โ which seems to have assumed the position of default gathering place for the DNM community on the clear web โ market goers are being reminded that some markets maintain a presence on the I2P network, with many presently reachable. Such markets include AlphaBay, Incognito, and Bohemia, and verifiable links to these markets can be found on the I2P version of tor.taxi. The I2P links for ASAP and Tor2Door, although listed on tor.taxi, are currently unreachable.
A PGP-signed canary update from Dread admin Paris, dated Dec. 27th, is the most recent communication from the Dread staff, and suggests that the forum will remain down through the start of the new year. The Dread Tor site displayed a status update page for about three weeks after the first notice from the admins that the forum was going offline, but now displays only the default โOnionsite Not Foundโ message.