Dread Offline for a Month

Dread is a critical source of truth in an anonymous community proliferated with scams. The popular Tor freedom of speech forum went offline on November 30th, 2022 and has yet to return. Typically the Dread admin team posts status updates on Reddit at /r/DreadAlert but communication has been sparse.

Dread is not dead yet. #

Darkdot received the following verified PGP statement from Hugbunter, who privately confirmed to our team on December 29th, 2022 that Dread will return.

Unfamiliar with PGP? Learning to verify messages is essential for your safety. Until then you can use our PGP verification tool.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

I, HugBunter, am alive and free as of Thursday, December 29th, 2022 and in full control of Dread and all related services. This canary is signed as part of a conversation with "Darkdot.com", to serve as verification of my identity and proof-of-life.

Restoration of Dread Network services is still in progress as of the time of writing.
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Hugbunter’s co-admin Paris also recently posted the following verified update publicly, confirming that they are in control of their PGP cryptographic identity. [Unverified due to formatting issues - this post will be edited shortly once verified]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

I, Paris am alive and free as of Tuesday, December 27th, 2022 and in full control of the Dread Network and related services.

Still having troubles getting the updated networking fully working within the cluster. Looking at after the new year right now.
Emergency updates are available here or at reddit via r/DreadAlert if our onion becomes unavailable.

Next canary is due Monday, January 2nd, 2023.
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This is normal. #

“This downtime is my fault.” - Paris in their December 20th canary update.

Dread is the most DDoS-attacked site in Tor history. It is the longest-standing source of reliable information on the Tor cryptomarket ecosystem, very much “critical safety infrastructure” to these communities.

Hugbunter and Paris, the admin team, have a reputation for disappearing for weeks, even months on end - with downtime occasionally coinciding.

In 2020, struggles with keeping Dread online led their team to develop Endgame, their open source Tor DDoS mitigation framework. It was publicly released and quickly became the standard used by all major Tor hidden services to stay online. Endgame v2 was released a year later with various updates.

Recent widespread Tor DDoS attacks have forced many Tor hidden service operators to rework their servers and code to better withstand the attacks. Some operators, including Dread, now host secondary mirrors of their sites using other privacy technologies like I2P. Is Endgame v3 on the way?

Where is everyone? #

The team behind Incognito Market opportunistically developed and launched Libre Forum during Dread’s downtime. It has a modest but growing userbase.

CryptBB has been around longer but remains largely undiscovered by Dread refugees.

The Hub was the primary “town square” of the cryptomarket ecosystem until Dread’s 2017 launch, but this author was unable to solve its CAPTCHA for this article.

Dread downtime has happened many, many times before. All we can do is keep calm, if a bit bored, while we wait for their admins to finalize upgrades.

Hugbunter’s Downtime Announcement #

For the sake of archival, here’s what Hugbunter posted on November 30th, 2022 at /r/DreadAlert regarding the downtime.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

Hi,

I'll try to keep this brief. As many of you are aware,
we've been hit with the largest scale DoS attack yet
which has been able to mostly hold Dread offline over
the past couple of months. Everything has been stable
on our alternative private onion links as well as the
I2P gateway and we actually restored full service for
the past few days on the main onion link.

Unfortunately we are now completely down on all access
points, which also affects Recon and the DNM Bible. I'd
like to apologize for the inconvenience, however we have
had to take urgent action in moving to the new server
cluster we have been working on. Paris is completing the
restructure, which will increase our ability to expand
resources towards countering DoS attacks and there are
a too many legacy systems we had in place that would be
far too difficult to change around if we were online
right now. We had intended for this to be a smooth
migration but sped up the process.

Within the next day or so, we'll place temporary
holding pages live on our onions and I2P gateway
explaining this and additionally publishing brief
updates or any emergency alerts there in the meantime.

Personally, I will be working on on-going projects to
get them to completion during this time, as well as
following through with the launch of a new platform
concept which should mitigate the effects of DoS
attacks in the future, hopefully rendering them
fairly useless. This will also involve restoring some
of Dread's API systems which I rewrote over the past
week, but any functionality for Dread will be
unavailable at this time. Please bare with us and
we'll be back to full service in no time and DoS
attacks will become a thing of the past, not just
for us, but for any affected service.

I'll also publish any further announcements here on
Reddit when needed.

Stay safe everyone and once again I apologize, we've
been working non-stop on solving everything.
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Archival of Paris’ December 20th canary update: [Unverified due to formatting issues - this post will be edited shortly once verified]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

I, Paris, am alive and free as of Tuesday, December 20th, 2022 and in full control of all Dread Network services.
This downtime is my fault. We should be up within the week.
Next canary is due Tuesday, December 27th, 2022.
Bitcoin hash: 0000000000000000000531a7b9cdf96051144d535ea70f1b8d787ce51cd30ef1
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