Michal Paszkiewicz

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GitHub DDoSed by China

GitHub has being suffering since 2:18 UTC this morning (27/03/2015) after a giant Denial of service attack managed to bring about a minor service outage.

The source of the DDoS attack is the Baidu Analytics service - a rival of Google Analytics based in China. JavaScript files inside Baidu Analytics have been hacked and are now sending requests to GitHub from most of the Chinese net's sites.

GitHub has counter attacked by setting the requested pages to load a script that throws a browser error. Now all the users of sites with Baidu Analytics will have errors in their browsers.

The attack is thought to be perpetrated by the Chinese goverment, as the repositories being attacked are:

1. The Chinese New York Times
2. Greatfire - a site bringing transparency to the great firewall of china

GitHub have dealt with this attack extremely well. Even though GitHub has had moments that were rather slow today, websites hosted by GitHub are entirely unaffected and all will soon be back to normal.

For more information please go here, here and here.