According to the web portal Darkdot.com and anonymous journalist Darkdotfail, the popular Darknet forum Dread has been down for a month. The popular forum, a place for darknet market (DNM) patrons to discuss security of transactions, evaluate specific vendors and talk about stealth delivery ideas, has been missing for 30 days. However, the founder of the forum “Hugbunter” said that it will start working again in the near future.
Dread Forum Founder Announces Relaunch Plans
In the underground world of darknet markets (DNMs), the Dread forum was known as a source of information. According to an update posted on darkdot.com on January 1, 2023, the forum has been down for a month. “Fear is a critical source of truth in an anonymous society overrun by fraud,” the update notes. “Popular Tor free speech forum went offline on November 30, 2022 and still not back.” The update adds that while the Dread admin team usually posts status updates on Reddit to /r/dreadalert, communication has been poor.
An anonymous journalist known as darkdotfail tweeted about the issue, and their website dark.fail also shows that Dread is currently offline. According to a January 5, 2023 update on the website, Dread is offline due to a DDOS attack and readers should follow /r/dreadalert for updates. On January 2, 2023, DNM and Tor researcher Dread wrote that Hugbunter, the founder, had privately confirmed that the forum would return. “Dread has been offline for a month now, Hugbunter has confirmed to us privately that he will be back,” wrote Darkdotfail. Two days later, Darkdotfail shared an update from the Reddit forum /r/dreadalert.
Privacy advocate and anonymous journalist he said:
Hugbunter posted an update on Dread’s stoppage on /r/dreadalert. Meanwhile, the team behind Incognito Market opportunistically coded during Dread’s downtime and launched a competing forum, Libre. Never get bored here.
The message from Hugbunter, which includes the founder’s PGP signature, explains that the team is “working hard to restore service.” In the message, the Dread founder estimates that the team is about a week from their reliable estimated time of arrival (ETA).
“Right now, we’re about a week away from being able to give a solid ETA on Dread’s return, but I will say we’re hoping for next week,” Hugbunter said. “It depends on whether there are any additional issues as we finalize everything on the server side, and while I can also work on some rewriting of the codebase in time, it’s not an easy or small task – so no extra pressure please.”
This isn’t the first time Dread has had a significantly long layoff. On September 30, 2019, Bitcoin.com News reported the forum’s first major outage. That’s when Hugbunter’s dead man switch was activated, resulting in a temporary loss of control of the forum. But Hugbunter returned a short time later and confirmed the identity of the forum owner via PGP keys associated with the Dread founder. The forum remained active until November 2022 with some exceptions due to DDOS attacks. In addition to Dread being cut off from DDOS attacks, the Tor Project reported that the Tor network itself was slowed down by about 50%.
In a January 3 message, Dread founder Hugbunter detailed that the forum’s DDOS issues will be fixed until it returns and “any other services that need help.” Hugbunter promised to relaunch Dread with an updated user experience and proper DDOS protection, saying: “My plans for the relaunch will also allow us all to move forward significantly for the foreseeable future and we will continue to update this space. . We’re not going anywhere and I still have a lot to provide and share.”
What do you think about Hugbunter explaining Dread’s current hiatus and the forum coming back soon? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comments section below.
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