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According to web portal darkdot.com and anonymous journalist Darkdotfail, the popular darknet forum Dread has been down for a month. The well-known forum, which was a place for darknet market (DNM) patrons to discuss operations security, rate specific vendors, and talk about stealth delivery ideas, has been absent for 30 days. However, the forum\u2019s founder, \u201cHugbunter,\u201d has stated that it will relaunch in the near future.<\/strong><\/p>\n In the underground world of darknet markets (DNMs), the forum Dread was known for being a go-to source of information. According to a Jan. 1, 2023 update hosted on darkdot.com, the forum has been down for a month. \u201cDread is a critical source of truth in an anonymous community proliferated with scams,\u201d the update notes. \u201cThe popular Tor freedom of speech forum went offline on Nov. 30, 2022, and has yet to return.\u201d The update adds that while the Dread admin team typically posts status updates on Reddit at \/r\/dreadalert, communication has been sparse.<\/p>\n The anonymous journalist known as Darkdotfail has written about the issue on Twitter and their website, dark.fail, also indicates that Dread is currently offline. According to a Jan. 5, 2023 update on the website, Dread is offline due to a DDOS attack and readers should follow \/r\/dreadalert for updates. On Jan. 2, 2023, the DNM and Tor researcher wrote that Dread\u2019s founder, Hugbunter, had privately confirmed that the forum will return. \u201cDread\u2019s now been offline for a month, Hugbunter privately confirmed to us that it will return,\u201d Darkdotfail wrote. Two days later, Darkdotfail shared an update from the Reddit forum \/r\/dreadalert.<\/p>\n The privacy advocate and anonymous journalist said<\/a>:<\/p>\n Hugbunter posted an update regarding Dread\u2019s downtime to \/r\/dreadalert. Meanwhile, the team behind Incognito Market opportunistically coded and launched a competing forum, Libre, during Dread\u2019s downtime. Never boring around here.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The message from Hugbunter, which includes the founder\u2019s PGP signature, explains that the team has been \u201cworking extremely hard to restore service.\u201d In the message, the Dread founder estimates that the team is about a week away from a solid estimated time of arrival (ETA).<\/p>\n \u201cAs of right now, we\u2019re about a week out from being able to give a solid ETA on a return of Dread, but I will say we\u2019re hopeful of it being next week,\u201d Hugbunter detailed<\/a>. \u201cThis depends on there being no further issues as we finalize everything on the server side and also if I manage to work through some rewrites of the codebase in a timely manner, however, it is not an easy or small task \u2014 So no further pressure please.\u201d<\/p>\n This is not the first time Dread has experienced a significantly long downtime. On Sept. 30, 2019, Bitcoin.com News reported<\/a> on the forum\u2019s first major outage. At that time, Hugbunter\u2019s dead man\u2019s switch was triggered<\/a>, resulting in a temporary loss of control over the forum. However, Hugbunter returned shortly after and validated the forum owner\u2019s identity through the PGP keys associated with the Dread founder. The forum remained active, with some exceptions due to DDOS attacks, until Nov. 2022<\/a>. In addition to Dread\u2019s outage from DDOS attacks, the Tor Project reported that the Tor network itself has slowed by close to 50%.<\/p>\n In the Jan. 3 message, Hugbunter, the founder of Dread, detailed that the forum\u2019s DDOS issues would be solved by the time it returns and \u201cany other service who needs assistance.\u201d Hugbunter promised that Dread will relaunch with a revamped user experience and proper DDOS protection, saying \u201cthe plans I have with the relaunch and also for the near future are going to allow all of us to move forward significantly and we will continue to innovate this space. We are not going anywhere and I still have much to provide and share.\u201d<\/p>\nDread Forum Founder Announces Plans to Relaunch<\/h2>\n
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