If you have recently experienced Tor network connectivity and performance issues, you are not the only one as many others have had issues with onion and i2p sites loading slower or not loading at all .

The Tor Project’s executive director, Isabela Dias Fernandes, revealed on Tuesday that a wave of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have been targeting the network since at least July 2022.

“At times, the attacks affected the network enough that users were unable to load pages or access onion services,” Fernandes said. said Tuesday.

“We have worked hard to mitigate the impacts and defend the network against these attacks. The methods and targets of these attacks have changed over time and we are adapting as these attacks continue.”

While the purpose of these ongoing attacks or the identity of the threat actor(s) behind them is not yet known, Fernandes said the Tor team will continue to tweak the network’s defenses to address this persistent issue. .

The Tor network team will also be expanded to include two new members focusing on the development of .onion services.

“In the interest of protecting the Tor network and our global community, we have chosen to limit public information about the nature of these attacks at this time,” Fernandes told BleepingComputer when we asked for more information about the attacks. DDoS.

“To clarify, our services have not been interrupted, but sometimes slow for some users, and it is important to note that user experience is affected by a variety of factors, including onion services used or relays selected. when they build a circuit via Tor.”

DDoS attacks also hit the I2P network

Tor is not the only anonymous communication network currently targeted by DDoS attacks. Peer-to-peer network I2P (short for Invisible Internet Project) has also been facing a massive attack for three days.

Therefore, I2P users may also encounter issues due to some i2pd routers crashing with OOM (out of memory) errors when affected by this denial of service attack.

“As you already know, the I2P network has been targeted by a denial of service attack for the past ~3 days. The attacker is flooding the network with malicious filler routers, which respond incorrectly or not at all to other routers and feeding the network with false information”, one of the mods of the I2P subreddit said yesterday.

“This causes performance and connectivity issues as the padding provides peer information to network participants. The result is a form of sybil attack that is used to cause widespread denial of service.

“This attack degraded network performance, but it remains intact and usable. Java I2P routers still seem to handle problems better than i2pd routers. Various mitigations should appear in development versions of Java and C++ routers the next week. “

Just like in the case of Tor, threat actors use a variety of tactics as “the attack starts/stops/changes multiple times a day”, as stated by the project manager and development manager. of I2P in a Tuesday community meeting on IRC.