Almost five months of being offline due to DDOS attacks the admins of Dread are back. Dread is often compared to as the Reddit of Tor and acts as the voice for news and concerns within the dark world of hidden marketplaces.
The largest and most reputable darknet forum, “Dread,” went offline for nearly 6 months due to a DDoS attack. Dread’s admin HugBunt3r opted to use the time to re-architect much of the website from scratch instead of fighting off the attacker. Although it took much longer than the pair anticipated, we are excited to see that Dread is back online.
Dread’s History:
- Dread, a Reddit-style forum, came into prominence during the 2018 Reddit bans against several darknet market discussion communities.
- The AlphaBay forums on Dread have been a hub for news on the recent exit scam.
- Dread is now looked at as the replacement to the now seized DeepDotWeb.
- In mid November 2022 Dread starts facing it’s downtime due to DDoS attacks;
Post Downtime Updates:
- Dread’s admin HugBunt3r released a statement that they’re restructuring the onion service.
- Their site infrastructure missteps clusters caused multiple delays.
- Starting in February, Dread admins invited volunteers to start testing the revamped website.
- Starting March 6th, Dread went online to the public.
- Soon after launch the core attacker started pounding Dread with a new DDOSS taking the site down again for a few days.
After enduring a prolonged period of downtime due to a persistent DDoS attack, Dread, often hailed as “The reddit of the Darknet,” has made a triumphant return. The announcement of the relaunch was made by HugBunter, the creator of Dread, on Reddit, who expressed overwhelming relief and excitement to see the project serve its intended purpose once again. However, the jubilation was short-lived as the site was hit with yet another heavy DDoS attack immediately after the announcement, rendering it inaccessible. Thankfully, after 24 hours, the situation seems to have improved, and the new Dread site is now available and loading.
HugBunter initially created Dread in early 2018, and it quickly gained popularity as a platform resembling Reddit on the darknet. In response to Reddit’s ban on darknet drug market-related subreddits in 2018, Dread underwent a revamp of its user interface to enhance security, with threads and subreddits that users can create, akin to Reddit. However, what sets Dread apart is that it operates without JavaScript, making it superior in terms of browser security.
Following the prolonged DDoS attack that brought Dread down in the latter half of 2022, HugBunter has been diligently working on finding a solution to revive the site, providing periodic updates on Reddit about the progress. Recently, Dread finally made its much-awaited return, accompanied by the introduction of a new system called Daunt, aimed at mitigating DDoS attacks. HugBunter explained that Daunt allows service operators to easily submit their mirrors in an automated manner, which are then served in the directory under their service. Operators also have the option to set restrictions for each mirror tier, determining access privileges. Moreover, operators can choose to require authentication or a captcha challenge within Daunt to access mirrors, providing them with greater flexibility and customization options.
After all the uncertainty from the community after the website remained offline for 5 months. It’s good to see the deep web resurfacing from the undeterred DDOS attempts. For more insight we’ve shared HugBunter’s detailed post on Dread’s restructure
You can find HugBunter’s full post including an extensive FAQ about Daunt on Dread’s relaunch using the onion link below. Here’s a condensed summary of HugBunter’s timeline and process to recovering Dread from the recent DDOS:
“After some tough months dealing with the DoS attacks late last year, where we did struggle to gain much uptime and were mostly pinned to the use of private Tor links and the I2P gateway, I had begun working on a concept that would assist us and other’s in providing availability for organic traffic (see my other announcement post). When we saw just how much damage the attacks were causing to the network and our servers were just getting trashed if we enabled any of the known onions for Dread or Recon, we decided to make a mostly rash decision, but the plan was to take down the cluster, burn it, gone. Then really spend some time, while being able to completely focus and not worry about management or monitoring the security of the entire cluster, in rebuilding with a new, more resiliant infrastructure, that implements everything we missed from the original cluster design. This was to allow more flexibility in scaling and provide more stability wherever possible. The initial talks between me and Paris resulted in a positive outlook, expecting a month give or take, until we could resume service. Boy, were we wrong! Not only did we completely under estimate what this would take, the theory of the plans really didn’t align with what was capable with our existing setups of the codebase and how our ridiculously large and messy database was going to run.
We added more time to our potential timeline and as we went, Paris was running into more and more problems with the dependencies of this new cluster design. Serious props to him for sticking through it, I know this has especially been tough on him, things really didn’t work out and our task lists just kept growing. During this time I worked on Daunt, getting everything configured and running smoothly and gradually getting market’s running with their API to publish mirrors on there. This was a long process, between bugs in the imports and availability for me to speak with the admins, different schedules and so on, especially when I was sleeping during the day after passing out from working days at a time without sleep. This delayed things significantly and then I moved onto rewriting the main functionality of the Dread codebase. Something I have needed to do for about 5 years… not joking. It is no easy task and that is understating it. The rushed code and the complexity of the database layer and how everything interacts means that separating anything out to make it more efficient, breaks the entire platform. Everything is way too interconnected. Again, I took this on to improve things, bring down our overheads and hopefully put some ease on the servers, yet way under estimated things with the theory and expected to be able to complete this in little over a week. In this time, I realized this was an impossible job and I was left with a complete mess where even the frontpage wasn’t able to load up, it was a no go. I decided it would be best to backtrack and work with the original code, integrating some of the new features I had developed and that I would continue on this in the near future, to give it the time and dedication it needs to do it right. The last few weeks have been a lot brighter and we’ve both been working through our task lists, getting more market admins on board with Daunt and improving the setup we have for the cluster. Not to mention, me and Paris have both had bouts of serious illness during this time, so that has been another factor.
1 week ago, March 1st, we got Dread live for private testing. Most things ran smooth with minor bugs here and there, thank you to absolutely everyone who participated in that testing, you’ve been of such great importance in getting us to the finish line.
Tor’s front Page is back
The relaunch of Dread serves as a reminder of its mission to provide a safer and more organized space for discussions related to marketplaces, particularly in light of recent exit scams in the darknet space. However, it’s crucial to always keep in mind the legal implications and ethical considerations when engaging in any activities on the darknet, and prioritize privacy and security at all times.
However, it is great to have the frontpage of the darknet back up, and all the juicy news that will come from it. With the AlphaBay forum back up on Dread hopefully some mods will shed light on the recent fall out from what appears to be an AlphaBay exit.
Onion Link: http://dreadytofatroptsdj6io7l3xptbet6onoyno2yv7jicoxknyazubrad.onion/post/f9a3e8d34c660f42101b
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