The flooder
Takes nothing from you directly. Creates the conditions the rest of the register depends on.
- What they want
- The real addresses to be slow or unreachable. What happens next is somebody else's business, and often the same person's.
- How they earn
- Indirectly. An unreachable market produces anxious people looking for a way in, which is the window the outage opportunist works.
- What it costs them
- Less than it should. Reaching a hidden service is expensive for the client by design, and that symmetry means forcing the service to do the work is cheap.
- How you meet them
- As slowness. Timeouts, hangs, pages that partly render, and a checking screen that never finishes.
- What gives them away
- Nothing, and it does not matter. From your side flooding and ordinary congestion are the same thing and call for the same response.
- What stops them
- Nothing you can do. What you control is not making it worse and not going looking for an address while it lasts.
Why hidden services are easy to flood
A service cannot see who is connecting. No source address, no geography, no reputation, so the entire toolkit an ordinary site uses to shed junk traffic is unavailable. There is also no equivalent of sitting something in front to absorb it, because the whole architecture exists to ensure nothing sits in front. Defence has to happen at the service itself, in the same place doing the real work.
What remains is limiting behaviour rather than identity, which is why rate limiting exists and why it feels arbitrary. It is the only tool available, and without it one person with a script could make an address unusable for everybody.
What it looks like from your side
| What you see | What to do |
|---|---|
| One address slow, others fine | Switch. Flooding is aimed at addresses, and the newest is often the one they have not scraped yet. |
| All slow, other onion services fine | Something shared. Wait. |
| All slow, other onions also bad | Network conditions. Nothing address specific helps. |
| Fast then progressively slower | You are hitting a limiter. Stop reloading. |
| Hangs with no error | A dead circuit. Build a new one rather than waiting. |
The thing worth remembering
Slowness is boring and self resolving. It becomes dangerous only when it makes you impatient enough to accept an address from somebody, which is precisely the sequence this profile exists to create. Waiting is not passive here, it is the countermeasure.