It has been a really hectic week for the guys over at GitHub as the US-based coding repository website has been on the receiving end of massive DDoS attacks which are apparently still going strong. The service dropped off the radar multiple times, but came back life soon and looks to be functioning properly at the time of writing this post.
The company has revealed through its blog that the attack started on Thursday March 26. It involves ‘a wide combination of attack vectors’ including new techniques which use web browsers of unaware users to flood the website with traffic.
It’s also said to be the largest DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack in the website’s history. The source of the assault is yet to be confirmed and GitHub believes there’s an intent behind these events. The post notes that it could be to persuade then into removing a specific class of content from the website, but doesn’t go into detail about the type of material.
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Even today, GitHub’s team has been ‘mitigating’ the attacks by deflecting traffic that’s deemed malicious. Over the weekend, the company did manage to bring the website back online and functioning at 100%, but with attacks still pouring in. As mentioned above, everything appears to be functioning well, but there’s no saying for how long as the most recent tweet reads ‘the DDoS attack has evolved and we are working to mitigate.’
Even GitHub’s Gist service which allows users to save bits of code online was affected from the attack. DDoS is the most commonly seen form of temporarily service interruptions as targeted servers are overloaded with traffic which pushes them offline.
Be sure to keep a check on the GitHub status website and also the Twitter account for real-time updates on the matter.