Handling bot attacks against a Tor hidden service
Pretty easy explanation: you've bumped into a few of the ~dozen people who are crawling hidden services for research or law enforcement purposes.<p>When you publish your HSDir they'll come and crawl, and chances are none of them were expecting a 50PB archive.org mirror and just got stuck.<p>It's likely that once the operators of each crawler realized this HS was an archive.org mirror they stopped the crawls.<p>The early version of a crawler I ran across hidden services would have tripped up in exactly this way[0]<p>Everything else in this post is either a misunderstanding of Tor[1] or plain paranoia.<p>[1] the top exit nodes have little to do with who is crawling or attacking a hidden service, France and Germany feature heavily in nodes because of the many cheap Tor-friendly hosts, there is nothing 'unusual' about unnamed nodes and the AS confusion is just someone doing a good job of staying anonymous - thanks for reporting them