Richard Huckle, the target of a complex investigation into a darkweb forum, was stabbed to death in his prison cell where he was serving multiple life sentence for various crimes involving child abuse and the distribution of illegal content on darkweb forums and chatrooms.

Europol, in the recently released 2019 Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment, covered some of the ongoing instability in the darkweb ecosystem as well as community response to some of law enforcement’s actions against marketplaces.

Dread is a new community service for Dark Net users, built from scratch without any frameworks by /u/hugbunter, the site was intended as a Dark Net Market security discussion and resource for web masters or researchers.

HugBunter is offering a $1,000 reward for a copy of some or all of the data from Cannabis Growers & Merchants Cooperative, a market that unexpectedly exited earlier this year. The CGMC data will be used to complete Recon, a darkweb search engine with information from almost every major darkweb marketplace.

A Berlusconi Market moderator revealed that Berlusconi administrators had disappeared nearly two weeks ago, leaving the rest of the staff without access to the server or the administrative functions needed to fix a bug preventing users from actually logging into the market.

The administrator of Dread opened the forum back up for users after adding measures to prevent bots, automated spam, and vote manipulation on comments and posts. The forum will receive another update at some point within the next week that will bring additional features and stability to the platform, HugBunter said.

Darkweb vendors have issued warnings to other vendors and members of darkweb forums about upcoming changes to the United States Postal Service’s Aviation Mail Security initiative that prohibit certain packages from entering the mail steam through Blue Boxes and Post Office mail slots.

More than a week after Dread went down for maintenance, HugBunter’s deadman switch was triggered, indicating that the owner of the largest darkweb forum no longer had control over the forum or his own equipment. His staff, in a message on the Dread homepage, said to assume the worst.