DDoS attack on GitHub has stopped? Status is green again. | Hacker News Reader

DDoS attack on GitHub has stopped? Status is green again.

status.github.com

36 pointssmurfpandey20 comments

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https://github.com/greatfire and https://github.com/cn-nytimes have both returned to normal as well.

I'm still seeing the unicorn via those URLs.

Yea I can't seem to get to those pages either.

Update: its working now, but it was definitely not working earlier.

It's working from my end.

I'm also unable to access the two repos that were apparently the target of the PRC's ire: https://github.com/cn-nytimes and https://github.com/greatfire

Is this simply a temporary precautionary measure because of the initial JS DDOS, or has GitHub permanently taken those two repos down?

If it's the latter, then I'm really disappointed and it would seem the PRC was able to get what it wanted.

Both repos are still up and accessible from my end (India).

They're there for me (I'm in the US-midwest.)

Interestingly, GitHub seem's to be allowing logged-in users to access those pages, but using a incongnito tab shows unicorns. I'm guessing they've just disabled access for unauthenticated requests.

Aha, you're right! Same behavior for me.

https://twitter.com/githubstatus/status/582862783827591168

Maybe...but it was green a couple of times on March 27 as well. Time will tell.

I think it's more they're no longer worried about it evolving any more.

They had said in their updates that they'd leave it yellow until it subsided.

https://status.github.com/messages

They're still hiding behind Prolexic/Akamai. I suspect the attacker is waiting for them to drop that protection.

From a state sponsored attacker I would have expected to see a BGP attack..

A BGP attack would be a whole new level of "This is war", probably with a bit more consequences.

Does anybody have any wider context regarding this attack? Is it the first time a massive DDoS like that was mitigated, with just minor disruptions to the victim?

Not by a long-shot; this was reported as a big deal (and I'd love to have more insight and data available), but this kind of thing has been going on for many years.

Ask your local DNS admin for some war stories. :-)

It also gained notoriety because it seemed like an attempt by a Chinese actor (possibly the PRC) to force Github to take down two repositories that helped to circumvent the Great Firewall.

Github itself has weathered DDoS attacks before, but I'm not sure how different this attack was in scale.

https://github.com/blog/1981-large-scale-ddos-attack-on-gith... explicitly states that "We are currently experiencing the largest DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack in github.com's history".

Prologue:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/19/anti-censorship-service-gre...

See links around this article, similar attacks have happened before:

http://www.netresec.com/?page=Blog&month=2015-03&post=China%...

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