World’s largest DDOS hits GitHub

DDOS hits GitHub

On Wednesday at around 17:21, the world’s largest DDOS recorded, hit GitHub. This was as approximately 1.3TB of data per second swarmed the developer platform.

GitHub is a common target for these type of attacks, with the Chinese government thought to be behind an attack. The previous attack occurred over 5 days in 2015. The attack on Wednesday, however, only lasted 9 minutes.

Much of this was down to the help of Akamai Prolexic. The DDOS mitigation service temporarily took over the service to ensure the site could be back as soon as possible. Much of the traffic from GitHub was redirected to the Prolexic “scrubbing” centres, where they worked to block malicious packets until the attackers relented and pulled back the attack.

In a blog post addressing the situation GitHub explain that they are continuously working to protect themselves from attacks such as this.

“We’re going to continue to expand our edge network and strive to identify and mitigate new attack vectors before they affect your workflow on GitHub.com.” 

It is clear with each new cyberattack such as the DDOS strategy, that they increase in size. It is refreshing to see a company having a successful plan to implement when such a problem hit. However, many could argue that as such a big target they would have been pretty stupid not to.

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