I recall that Operation Onymous's location of the servers of numerous darknet markets has been vaguely linked to the government attacking Tor. Numerous vectors have been discussed:
The forensic interest in quite how international cybercrime initiative 'Operation Onymous' defied Tor's obfuscating protocols to expose hundreds of 'dark net' sites, including infamous online drug warehouse Silk Road 2.0, has led many to conclude that the core approach to deanonymisation of Tor clients depends upon becoming a 'relay of choice' - and a default resource when Tor-directed DDOS attacks put 'amateur' servers out of service."
In addition, rumors are abound that the government used a method based on a canceled talk called You Don't Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget
Now that the major market Evolution has disappeared, is it possible that the feds feel that DDOSing the Tor network is more likely to locate servers? As Backopy said, if a large portion of the traffic on Tor flocks towards a single hidden service, is anonymity threatened? Is that why Agora recently shut down due to their security protocols? Are they aware that someone is out for them?
If darknetmarkets are under jeopardy due to more concentrated traffic following evoscam, the community must figure out how to respond. Although Agora purports that
Our setup is not simply a regular web server with extra Tor daemon running on it. We had to implement other levels of protection on top of that, including proxy VPN connections, constant changing of servers, additional software which is not found on any normal web server which handles intrusion detection.
would this prolonged downtime and instability be a consequence of these cautionary moves? I'm not sure how Evolution managed to survive for so long with such good uptime, but the current situation seems to be quite sketchy.
How should the community as a whole respond to the weaknesses in Tor? What was Evolution able to do to keep things running so smoothly without getting pinched?
edit: Could a mod change the title to "Is the Tor Network under attack?" I forgot the the; small errors like this irritate me.
At any time, you can be assured the answer is Yes.
The captcha script being removed, and user sessions being purged while the rest of the site was still running points to Yes.