As reported by anonymous journalists at Darkdot.com, the popular darknet forum Dread has been offline for the last month due to a DDOS attack. However, the founder of the forum, “Hugbunter”, has officially announced that the forum will be relaunched soon.
Dread Forum Returns After 30 Day DDOS Attack
In the underground dark web marketplace (DNM) community, Dread Forum serves as a key source of information, discussion and reviews. According to a website update on January 1, 2023, the forum went offline on November 30, 2022 and since then, communication has been limited to the subreddit /r/dreadalert.
The anonymous journalist, known as Darkdotfail, has written about the topic on Twitter. His website dark.fail also confirms that Dread is currently unavailable. In a January 1 update, Darkdotfail states that Dread’s downtime was caused by a DDOS attack. For the latest updates, readers are asked to follow the subreddit /r/dreadalert. On January 2, 2023, the DNM Tor Researcher wrote that Dread’s founder, Hugbunter, had privately confirmed that the forum would shortly be back.
“Dread has been offline for a month, Hugbunter privately confirmed to us that it will be back,” Darkdotfail wrote. Two days later, Darkdotfail shared an update on the Reddit forum /r/dreadalert. The message from Hugbunter includes his PGP signature and explains that a team is working hard to restore service.
“Right now, we’re a week away from being able to give a solid ETA on Dread’s return, but I’ll say we’re hopeful it’s next week,” Hugbunter detailed. “This is contingent upon there being no more problems as we finish everything on the server and also if my codebase rewrites are completed in a timely fashion. It’s not an easy job so no more pressure, please.”
This is not the first time that Dread has experienced a significant downtime. On September 30, 2019, the forum experienced its first major outage when Hugbunter’s dead man’s switch was activated and temporarily took control away from the forum owner. However, Hugbunter soon returned and verified his identity using PGP keys. The forum remained active until the DDOS attacks in November 2022. In addition to the Dread outage due to DDOS attacks, the Tor network itself has also been hampered by nearly 50%.
In the January 3 message, Hugbunter explained that the forum’s DDOS issues will be resolved when he returns and that the site will be relaunched with a new user experience and proper DDOS protection. “The plans I have with the relaunch and also for the near future will allow us all to make significant progress and continue to innovate in this space. We aren’t going anywhere, and I still have much to offer and share.”
What are your thoughts on the downtime currently occurring? Are you reassured by Hugbunter explicitly stating that the forum will return soon? Let us know your thoughts on this topic by leaving comments below.
