You know, I hate that things like this keep happening, but my onion site appears to be down, and I’m not sure what the cause is.

It’s possible that my “security” wasn’t secure enough, and someone was able to break in, but I don’t know that for certain. Even popular onion sites go down on occasion. If it’s down for good, though, we just might have to generate a new one.

Geez, and I thought that after restoring my laptop, my “data loss” troubles were over! Fortunately, as with the laptop, there wasn’t much data on the site, to begin with, so it’s no great travesty.

I’ll have to use something like Shallot or Eschalot to do the job if that’s the case. Yay hooray bravo…

If you haven’t heard of it before, Shallot is one of the programs that people use to generate vanity onion addresses. Shane McRetro explains a bit about it in this blog post from two years ago: Generating Custom Darknet Onion Names

Scallion and Eschalot have similar purposes, though they work differently. Scallion uses GPU hashing, whereas Eschalot uses a wordlist search. (Those links go to their respective GitHub pages).

Anyhow, I don’t know exactly why the site is down, but perhaps it’s time that I gain some expertise in this area so that I can manage it myself! After all, most of the markets have multiple addresses for this reason. Without regard to that, even the markets with alternate URLs often have phishing sites. Wouldn’t it be interesting if there were a “Secrets of the Dark” phishing site? (I should do that just for kicks.)

So, what’s next, then? Maybe I’ll use Eschalot and try this over again, or just stay on the clearnet for now. I’ve also been traversing the dark web for disturbing stuff, but only have occasional luck with that.

If you have any other requests or ideas for places I should investigate, feel free to contact me. I’ll be in my “dark web office” until 10 PM.