Dread, a Darknet Forum to Relaunch: Recovers from DDOS

• Dread experienced a DDOS attack and has been down ever since. 
• It is a go-to forum for discussion on various topics on Darknet. 
• The team will be able to give ETA in a week. 

Web portal darkdot.com and an anonymous journalist named Darkdotfail revealed that Dread, a popular darknet forum, will be relaunching soon after being down for a month. A place for darknet market (DNM) patrons to discuss various topics ranging from stealth delivery ideas, operation security, rating specific vendors etc. 

According to the January 1, 2023 update on darkdot.com, “Dread is a critical source of truth in an anonymous community proliferated with scams.”

Darkdotfaail, an anonymous journalist, indicated that Dread is currently offline. DNM and Tor researchers wrote on January 2, 2023, that Hugbunter Dread’s founder privately confirmed that the forum would return. The team behind Incognito Market coded and launched a competing forum named Libre.

Hugbunter said:

“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.”

It is not the first time the forum has experienced a downtime, as on September 30, 2019, media reported on Dread’s first major outage. Citing the reason for the dead man switch being triggered, which caused a temporary loss of control, but it returned shortly. Remained active with some inconsistencies due to the DDOS attack til November 2022. Moreover, due to the outage from the attacks, the Tor project reported that their Tor network slowed by almost 50%. 

Hugbunter promised in a message on January 3, 2022, that the relaunch and revamping of the user experience and proper DOS protection, and other issues would be solved by the time it returns. 

He also said his plans to relaunch and for the near future would allow all to move forward significantly, with continuing innovation in the space. The forum is not going anywhere, as it still has much to share and provide. 

A malicious attempt is targeted to disrupt the usual traffic of the target server, network or service by inordinate the target or the surrounding infrastructure with an influx of internet traffic. Achieved by utilizing multiple compromised systems as a source to attack traffic. The exploited machines can be anything from computers, network resources, tools like IoTs, servers etc. 

From a broader perspective, a DDOS attack is like an unexpected traffic jam that could clog up the highway and roads, preventing one from reaching a destination under normal circumstances. 

Famous DDOS attacks

Such attacks are not uncommon; AWS experienced similar attacks in February 2020, GitHub in February 2018, Dyn in 2016, GitHub again in 2015, Spamhaus in 2013, Mafiaboy in 2000, and Estonia in 2007. 

Hackers attack an organization with DDOS mainly to disrupt its normal functioning, where pseudo traffic generated by the attack prevents real traffic from reaching the platform. And they experience a Denial of Service message, in this case, Distributed Denial of Service. 

Nancy J. Allen is a crypto enthusiast and believes that cryptocurrencies inspire people to be their own banks and step aside from traditional monetary exchange systems. She is also intrigued by blockchain technology and its functioning.

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