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Comment by ihuman | Hacker News Reader

Who would try to disable github?

Back in 2009 when it happened to bitbucket, this was afaik due to hosting a particular project (hurting bitbucket was a side effect of hurting this particular project, some communities seems to be happy to resolve issues with DDoS attacks...).

It could just be some rogue deployment script running from EC2 that are a little more active that it should be. Imagine someone is deploying their 1GB repo from GitHub to 100 small EC2 instances :)

My startup cucumbertown.com is hit with similar issues.

Initially we blocked all Ec2[1] & spamhaus ip list. But then realized Flipboard proxies[2], some blog aggregation proxies etc are based on Ec2 machines.

What would be a good way to block such rogue machines? Is there a community sponsored list or Ec2/Rackspace ips that are creating issues?

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1528

http://flipboard.com/browserproxy/

Banks were being hit the first week of October, then I know some VoIP servers were being hit such as Callcentric by DDoS. I can see why the banks were hit, but not why so many much smaller businesses are being attacked.

I would think being small(er) and having 100M in the bank makes github a pretty good target, unfortunately.

I don't think so. If you we're hosting GitHub you would figure out pretty easily if it was related to cloning a specific repo from AWS and just disable the account hosting the repo.

Thank is exactly what I was thinking. Who in their right mind would want to do that?

Someone who wants to test the limits of their botnet and technique. Can you think of a more tech savvy target?

Amazon.

Amazon has a service outage every time you look at it funny, much less a DDoS...

hyuk, hyuk

DDOSs are typically defeated through buying lots and lots of transit. That's an exercise in outspending your adversary.

A small entity like github should be trivial to saturate.

Google. Amazon. Microsoft. Apple. Facebook. Most startups.

Most startups? Name even one startup in the same league as the others you've named.

Attacking a rails application, you would be proud of that? Rails sites are not exactly known for their performance.

I know a few governments who would be more than happy for github to be disabled.

Care to elaborate why GitHub would be a target for a state sponsored DDOS attack? Seems a little far-fetched, for a website that is virtually unknown outside of the developer community

In the broadest sense, github is a site where anyone can upload and publicize any file of reasonable size. Depending on who is uploading what, that could easily make them a target.

In the broadest sense, about 10 million web-forums and similar sites also match your description...

Why would they go for github of all things?

While not as famous as Tor in Iran, for example, there are VPN implementations on GitHub, in addition to what rcthompson said.

There's some statistic out there somewhere from some paper which found out that like 3 out of every 4 (or something ridiculous like that) cyber attack on the US government comes from China so...it's not that farfetched.

I don't quite see how that is relevant to a non-US government entity like GitHub.

it was sourceforge

It's the standard weapon of botnet blackmail. Target a large site, bring it down, ask for money.

Fighting DDoS attacks is not trivial, especially if you're against a sophisticated botnet, and your code has multiple slow parts.

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