@drug_addicted_victim That might be true if Empire was running on a toaster with a 56kbps modem for a connection.
@Psychofrog When it becomes green more often then the attack has stopped :3 No one knows when though. v3 mirrors should have been the solution. Dread admins described 50k active connections sending requests. Doesn't seem much for a clearnet layer 7 attack but the way Tor daemon works (synchronous) makes it a lot worse than it sounds. Kinda reminds me of Apache's c10k problem until we no longer hear about it thanks to clearnet technologies like Cloudflare and a modern architecture for the web server by Nginx.
We're running running the network requests more often now just to try and keep you updated minute by minute on the status of Empire. The DDoS seems to make it very unstable at the moment. We advise against picking up mirrors from any untrusted resources (forums, comments, blogs, ...etc). Always use https://onion.live/sign/key to verify the mirror before submitting any sensitive information.
@Psychofrog And to help vendors get listed easier we're working on a new listing guide/wizard. Seems like that's the future whether we liked it or not.
@psychofrog that's why to avoid it becoming even darker we think we should provide a comprehensive trust report on each vendor. if a vendor shop gets many scam reports it would be delisted immediately from our index.not so much darker if goat hosting becomes affordable. like a wordpress site on a vhost affordable. this ddosing a vendor shouldn't affect others. and let's be honest monolith markets are much more lucrative targets for law enforcement. it's a single point of failure and bringing one site down would stop tens of millions of dollars in illegal transactions world wide.and even worse. one site exit scamming would make tens of millions of dollars. and would hurt users' trust in the entire network.
@psychofrog yeah and v3 mirrors don't seem to help at all. are we heading to a future where each vendor run his own hidden service? we're getting more and more listing requests each day from new vendors with their own goat shops. seems like vendors are sick from ddos on giant monolith markets like empire. hurts the rep when you are a vendor with 10k pending orders and you can't even login to your account. it's even worse for users who are so desperate that they try links they find in "god knows where" and get phished for hundreds or even thousands of usd.imho decentralization seems to be the only long term solution to this.
@Psychofrog That's how DDoS seems from the outside. Thank goodness we have links discovery service that can auto detect and verify new mirrors. It looks like a strobe light though :3
@atkinson657 No he certainly never got phished from here cuz the site owners are security freaks focusing on anonymity on the darknet. All mirrors are verified before publishing.
Hello We don't provide phishing links at all and we do not intend on doing that. It hurts the rep and you'll eventually notice. So stop spreading fear or you'll get banned permanently !!