Large Scale DDoS Attack on GitHub.com

_optl · on March 27, 2015

"Based on reports we've received, we believe the intent of this attack is to convince us to remove a specific class of content."

Can anyone decipher this?

yellowapple · on March 27, 2015

Basically, some attacker (suspected to be the Chinese government) hijacked Baidu (and Baidu users) to perform a DDoS attack on specific Github repos pertaining to GreatFire.org (a site dedicated to mirroring sites/content that were censored by the Chinese government).

The attack has since been addressed by GitHub (it relies on XSS, so GitHub was actually able to inject a Javascript `alert()` to each attack attempt; this not only warns the user that the site is doing naughty things, but also stops further JS execution IIRC), and it seems the attack itself has also stopped.

More information: https://archive.today/jZ0zb

ubernostrum · on March 27, 2015

Read one of the other threads on the subject.

_optl · on March 27, 2015

Thanks! I really appreciate it!