International Business Times spreading rumours concerning Trade Route, one of the most popular darkweb markets.
After news broke today that the top four markets had mysteriously gone offline, panic spread deeper in the world of darkweb markets this week.
International Business Times later suggested it could be down to DDoS, as it happened "without any notification or clarification from the sites’ administrators".
Although with some small amount of research, such as heading to the Trade Route reddit page, will confirm that two days ago a moderator already made an announcement.
It read that the site would be down due to "a massive migration of data, as well as doing multiple bug fixes" and that "TR IS here to stay, as we have all seen when we go down, it’s for the betterment of the site/server and endusers"
It's also worth noting that DeepDotWeb's list of top makets, highlighting whether they are online or offline (green or red), is not always an accurate indicator of whether the market is up or down.
For example Dream Market's as I write the ticker is red, and notably the main url is slow to load, but other mirrors load almost instantly. However, earlier in the week the login captcha failed led to lack of access to the site for over 24 hours.
Although it is true that T•chka appears to be down and Wall St is now back up with a new mirror after reporting "We are facing a very powerful DDos Attack at the moment. We are working hard to mitigate this asap."
It's also not unsurprisingly to think that these servers struggle to cope with an influx of buyers and vendors during certain periods, whilst at the same time being a prime target for DDoS from numerous enemies.
Trade Route, which remains relatively new to the market, attempt to fill the gap that AlphaBay left in July 2017, such as offering the anonymous cryptocurency Monero, as well as Bitcoin for more traditional buyers.
On the contrary, the current no.1 darkweb shop Dream Market continues to only offer Bitcoin after 4 years of existence, while both markets offer PGP based two-factor authentication, that is not yet common place on the darkweb.
Trade Route's PGP signed announcement dated 11th October 2017 that was posted on their official Reddit page by Trade Route Moderater:
Big TR update/upgrade going on.
TradeRoute Vendors & Users,
Please remain calm. TR is doing a massive migration at the moment of data,
as well as doing multiple bug fixes and an update to our code to prevent
future bugs from cropping up like the payment bug.This will take a bit of time so, in that time we ask you to remain calm
and know that we will be back to serve you.Due to the fact that many of the things that are happening with the
server are OPSEC related I will not be going into further detail,
just know that we will be back up.We have a lot of work to do in the mean time and need to restart
the server a few times while doing it. The process will take as long as it takes
and at the moment I cannot give you a solid ETA of when everything will be all set.In the mean time, trust nothing that is not posted by either
myself or SamCulperTR as we are the only two that can speak for TR right now.This announcement was posted on the /r/TradeRoute/ subreddit,
which is the ONLY official TR subreddit, if you are reading this somewhere else,
like one of the many imitation subreddits,
come to ours for official updates as the
other subreddits may try to mislead you.TR IS here to stay, as we have all seen when we go down
it’s for the betterment of the site/server and endusers.
As we have seen before, it's alway's temporary.This messages was created on: Oct. 11
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJZ3h3wAAoJED6k40iZGyTys50P/2nGPgricklMElsPBIIpuCy8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=hAVK
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----