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Comment by fjordan | Hacker News Reader

Maybe someone from GitHub can tell us.

I'm having a difficult time reasoning as to the motivation behind all the DDOS attacks. Why would anyone want to disrupt a tool for open, public collaboration used by many free and open-source technologies.

Anyone have any insight?

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Github.com is a profitable entity that makes a fairly large amount of money. Additionally, Github.com hosts a lot of content. Content that other people may not like.

Possibilities are: 1) Extortion of some sort i.e. We want your money, or we'll DDoS you every week 2) Content i.e. Remove repositories a, b, and c with content we don't like, or we'll DDoS you every week 3) Weapons demonstration i.e. We want to show off what l33t hax0rs we are, so we'll DDoS Github.com every week

Do they not have the bandwidth or resources to stop or mitigate something like this from happening? I would've thought they'd have better resources in place in case of something like this.

Just a theory, but perhaps some hackers trying to flex their muscles and stroke their ego's by taking down GitHub.

Would make sense. Saw a bunch of that at the Rio during defcon. Print my boarding pass? Nope. Somebody broke all of the machines. Order a movie or checkout on the TV from my room? Nope. Someone broke the outdated system.

Tools gonna tool.

To a degree this is pretty funny. Are you sure the hotel didn't do it on purpose just to remove the opportunity for hackers to get over on the hotel?

Yes. These systems weren't disabled, they were broken.

Not trying to be a buzkill, but I fail to see how it's funny. So you can break an old - undoubtedly unpatched - win xp box that people use to print boarding passes. Congrats.

> Why would anyone want to disrupt a tool for open, public collaboration used by many free and open-source technologies

and a lot of closed source commercial projects.

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