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Large Scale DDoS Attack on GitHub.com

35 points| jnewland | 11 years ago |github.com

4 comments

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frewsxcv|11 years ago

"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|11 years ago

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|11 years ago

Read one of the other threads on the subject.