The Tor Project will eliminate a bug that has been used for years to destroy both legitimate Onion sites and underground darknet trading platforms using DDoS attacks.
The bug that scared away the inhabitants of the darknet
The developers of the Tor Project will eliminate a vulnerability that for several years allows you to remotely disable “secret” darknet sites in the zone.onion. According to the ZDNet resource, this problem will be solved with the release of the Tor protocol version 0.4.2.
A vulnerability that allows a DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service, distributed denial of service attack) has been actively used by attackers for a long time. At first, the owners of legitimate darknet sites complained about such attacks, but recently their vector has shifted to underground platforms dealing in illegal goods such as drugs, weapons, malicious software and stolen personal data.
So, in April 2019, the three largest trading platforms of darkweb – Dream Market, Empire Market and Nightmare Market – were subjected to a series of powerful attacks carried out for the purpose of extortion. According to the administrator of Dream Market, unknown attackers demanded the equivalent of $ 400 thousand in bitcoins for stopping the attack, but the owners of the popular resource refused to pay and simply closed the store. At the end of May 2019, another platform, Libertas Market, announced its departure from Tor. A large portal for the sale of prohibited goods has switched to I2P technology (Invisible Internet Project, IIP, I2P – the Invisible Internet project).