Dread is a

Reddit Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images ...

-like

dark web The dark web is the World Wide Web content that exists on ''darknets'': overlay networks that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access. Through the dark web, private computer networks can communi ...

discussion forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...

featuring

news News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different Media (communication), media: word of mouth, printing, Mail, postal systems, broadcasting, Telecommunications, electronic communication, or through the tes ...

and discussions around

darknet markets A darknet market is a commercial website on the dark web that operates via darknets such as Tor or I2P. They function primarily as black markets, selling or brokering transactions involving drugs, cyber-arms, weapons, counterfeit currency, stolen ...

. The site's administrators go by the alias of Paris and HugBunter.

History

Dread is a popular community hub which has been described as a "

-style forum" and the successor of the seized

DeepDotWeb DeepDotWeb was a news site dedicated to events in and surrounding the dark web featuring interviews and reviews about darknet markets, Tor hidden services, privacy, bitcoin, and related news. The website was seized on May 7, 2019, during an inves ...

for discussion around market law enforcement activity and

scams A confidence trick is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their trust. Confidence tricks exploit victims using their credulity, naïveté, compassion, vanity, confidence, irresponsibility, and greed. Researchers have def ...

. It came to prominence in 2018 after Reddit banned several darknet market discussion communities, rapidly reaching 12,000 registered users within three months of being launched, and 14,683 users by June 2018. In September 2019, HugBunter's

dead man's switch A dead man's switch (see alternative names) is a switch that is designed to be activated or deactivated if the human operator becomes incapacitated, such as through death, loss of consciousness, or being bodily removed from control. Originally a ...

was triggered, accompanied by a weeks-long absence, signifying the temporary loss of control over the site. The site would be reinstated in November, with a revamped user interface, and remains active as of September 2022. It became known that the cause of the outage was a server failure, according to HugBunter, despite rumors concerning a potential compromising from a third party or law-enforcement authority.

Activities

In May 2019 a moderator of

Wall Street Market A darknet market is a commercial website on the dark web that operates via darknets such as Tor or I2P. They function primarily as black markets, selling or brokering transactions involving drugs, cyber-arms, weapons, counterfeit currency, st ...

posted its hidden IP address to Dread, potentially leading to its

exit scam An exit scam is a confidence trick where an established business stops shipping orders while receiving payment for new orders. If the entity had a good reputation, it could take some time before it is widely recognized that orders are not shipping ...

and seizure shortly after. Stolen data is sometimes sold via Dread. The site features in-depth guides around manufacture of illegal drugs. The shutdown of

Dream Market Dream Market was an online darknet market founded in late 2013. Dream Market operated on a hidden service of the Tor network, allowing online users to browse anonymously and securely while avoiding potential monitoring of traffic. The marketplace ...

was announced on Dread in March 2019. Major

denial-of-service attack In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connect ...

s have been launched against Dread and other markets exploiting a vulnerability in the

Tor Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to: Places * Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain * Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city * Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano * Tor Bay, Devon, England * Tor River, Western New Guinea, Indonesia Sc ...

protocol.

References

{{Tor hidden services Dark web Darknet markets Internet properties established in 2018 Tor onion services Internet forums