Why Onion Sites are easily DDoSed and why amazing sites like Dread need your help! : HiddenService | Torhoo darknet markets
Most of us (Except premium members) experienced the downtime on Dread a couple days ago, alot of newbies may not understand why it happens often and what it really means when Hugbunter addresses the community about DDoS attacks.
Onion services rely on a network of Tor relays that have far less bandwidth and no built-in traffic filtering, so it takes relatively little effort for an attacker to flood their introduction points or overload their circuits. These hidden-service limitations make it easy to knock sites offline with a flood of bogus connection requests or by exhausting relay capacity. Non-profit projects like Dread although having amazing skills and technical work, and an amazing captcha cannot afford the needed DDoS mitigation or large-scale hosting solely through banners and ads, Captchas challenge the client only after the tor circuit is already built so avolumetric attack can definitely do alot of damage and consume tons of relay bandwidth. In other words, you’d fend off unsophisticated scripts that chew through your web forms, but you’d still be exposed to low level DDoS that never reached the captcha.
Unfortunately the attackers are always funded by sour markets or LE, so they can afford persistance. The best thing you can do as a member of the community is keep supporting and donate a bit of that XMR to keep Dread active.