Popular coding site Github recently suffered from a massive distributed-denial-of-service attack which the company claims is the largest denial-of-service attack in its history.
Beginning Thursday, GitHub was hit by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that targeted two GitHub pages that link to copies of websites banned in China namely Great Fire and CN-NY Times with large volumes of Web traffic. These websites are used by Chinese users to circumvent government censorship.
In a blog post published last week, GitHub acknowledged having facing a DDoS attack which began early on March 26 and it is yet to end.
The coding website noted that the attack “involves a wide combination of attack vectors,” which “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.”
“Based on reports we’ve received, we believe the intent of this attack is to convince us to remove a specific class of content,” Github said.
China is being expected to be the main source of the attack, the Wall Street Journal reports.
As per the report, GitHub’s traffic surge came from China’s largest search engine, Baidu. Security experts are claiming that the vast levels of traffic, which was originally meant for Baidu has paralyzed GitHub over the DDoS attack’s duration.
Responding on the allegations, a Baidu spokesman said that the company had conducted an investigation and found that it wasn’t involved in the attack and its systems weren’t breached either.
“We have notified other security organizations and are working to get to the bottom of this,” the spokesman said.
