GitHub Faces Largest Ever DDoS Attack, All Blames On China
Popular US coding site and one of the most visited site by techies and coders 'GitHub' has been facing the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. According to the site, the attack is the largest one it has even seen. GitHub.com faced the cyber-attack beginning Thursday and the battle for survival still continues for the site. Wall Street Journal recently published a post that suggests the involvement of China behind the act. GitHub identified the severity of the attack on March 26, as the attack continued to evolve. According to the site, all systems are currently working perfectly but they are on high alert as the attack traffic continues to grow.
Attackers use DDoS attack to shut down a service or site by dumping large amount of data making servers unable to serve the legitimate users. Security experts said the attack was carried out by directing the data traffic from China’s search-giant Baidu to GitHub. Experts also believe that the data specifically targeted two of the site’s pages which linked to the copies of the websites banned in China. One page was New York Times Chinese language website while the other was the one that lets Chinese uses bypass Government censorship. Baidu has declined about its involvement in the attack and confirmed that its systems aren’t compromised.
GitHub, on its #-Link-Snipped-# provided various graphs about the mean response times and pages builds failure rate. Famous security researcher Mikko Hyponen also hinted about the involvement of Chinese authorities as according to him, attackers were able to manipulate web traffic belonging to China’s Internet infrastructure to high extent. He also believes that the attackers were so sophisticated that they were able to tamper all of the China’s Internet traffic. Hackers were not satisfied just with users in China, but they used every user visiting Baidu. Reportedly, a code was executed that sent continuous requests from users’ systems to GitHub. The attack became difficult to handle as the requests came from all over the world making it impossible to identify the legitimate users. However, Chinese government has been repeatedly denying that it has anything to do with the attack.
Via <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-coding-website-github-hit-with-cyberattack-1427638940" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">U.S. Coding Website GitHub Hit With Cyberattack - WSJ</a>
Attackers use DDoS attack to shut down a service or site by dumping large amount of data making servers unable to serve the legitimate users. Security experts said the attack was carried out by directing the data traffic from China’s search-giant Baidu to GitHub. Experts also believe that the data specifically targeted two of the site’s pages which linked to the copies of the websites banned in China. One page was New York Times Chinese language website while the other was the one that lets Chinese uses bypass Government censorship. Baidu has declined about its involvement in the attack and confirmed that its systems aren’t compromised.
GitHub, on its #-Link-Snipped-# provided various graphs about the mean response times and pages builds failure rate. Famous security researcher Mikko Hyponen also hinted about the involvement of Chinese authorities as according to him, attackers were able to manipulate web traffic belonging to China’s Internet infrastructure to high extent. He also believes that the attackers were so sophisticated that they were able to tamper all of the China’s Internet traffic. Hackers were not satisfied just with users in China, but they used every user visiting Baidu. Reportedly, a code was executed that sent continuous requests from users’ systems to GitHub. The attack became difficult to handle as the requests came from all over the world making it impossible to identify the legitimate users. However, Chinese government has been repeatedly denying that it has anything to do with the attack.
Via <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-coding-website-github-hit-with-cyberattack-1427638940" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">U.S. Coding Website GitHub Hit With Cyberattack - WSJ</a>
0