GitHub, the first-rate US-based software coding site, is slammed by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) onslaught. The DDoS attack on the site is suspected to have initiated from China.
GitHub website is mostly popular for serving as a storage area of different types of coding projects which range from web app frameworks, game engines to security applications. Various tech firms and software developers look up to the site to access these tools and applications in their software development projects. Since Thursday, GitHub site was inaccessible to all developers and firms owing to a huge DDoS attack. GitHub has confirmed the news of Distributed Denial of Service attack on its blog post after the attack happened and also said that it was the largest in the history of github.com site. Till now, the site is under attack and GitHub employers are still in the process of fixing the inaccessibility issue resulted from the DDoS attack.
Possible cause of the attack
GitHub said that the DDoS attack –
“involves a wide combination of attack vectors that includes every vector we’ve seen in previous attacks as well as some sophisticated new techniques that use the web browsers of unsuspecting, uninvolved people to flood github.com with high levels of traffic.”
On the basis of their reports, they have concluded the cause of the attack as –
“Based on reports we’ve received, we believe the intent of this attack is to convince us to remove a specific class of content.”
Security experts reasoned that large share of the site’s traffic is intended for a China-based site Baidu which is severely affected after the attack occurred to GitHub site. And this “specific class” of content is most likely related to China. Two specific content areas on GitHub are mostly targeted; the one part which is run by an anticensorship site called Greatfire.org that releases codes to dodge censorship tools of China or “”Great Firewall of China” and the other part that has the repositories of all banned domains and the Chinese language version of the New York Time site.
When reached for comments on the DDoS attack on GitHub website, Baidu has rebuffed its involvement stating that it “was not intentionally involved in any traffic redirection.” So far GitHub site has posted on Twitter that “87 hours in, our mitigation is deflecting most attack traffic. We’re aware of intermittent issues and continue to adapt our response.”
