Coding site GitHub yesterday revealed that it was deflecting most of the traffic from a days-long cyber attack that had caused intermittent outages for the social coding site.
The Wall Street Journal is citing China as the source of the attack.
The attack came in the form of a flood of traffic, known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack. Those kinds of attacks are among the most common on the Internet.
“Eighty-seven hours in, our mitigation is deflecting most attack traffic. We’re aware of intermittent issues and continue to adapt our response,” a tweet from the GitHub Status account said.
The Internet traffic to GitHub came from Chinese search engine Baidu Inc, targeting two GitHub pages that linked to copies of sites that are banned in China.
The attack began early on Thursday and involved a wide combination of attack vectors, which included 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.
The intent of this attack is to convince us to remove a specific class of content. Github said.
However, A Baidu spokesman has said that the company had conducted a thorough investigation and found that it was neither a security problem on Baidu’s side nor a hacking attack.
“We have notified other security organizations and are working to get to the bottom of this,” the spokesman said.
Via IBN Live
