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Who is DDOSing GitHub and why?
- sejje 14y agoThey're not overly successful--I've had some slow page loads, but no serious interruption of service.
- zalew 14y agoI noticed yesterday I can't install anything through https:// https://, git:// urls work fine
- eridius 14y agoYou sure it was https? For a short time they blocked port 80 specifically so git:// and https:// https:// would be able to work.
- Tobu 14y agoYeah, I had one https:// https:// clone stop in mid-download. I repeated it immediately and it stopped midway again, I tried again after half an hour or so and it went through. This was before they disabled port 80, so I expect this was resource exhaustion, the smart-https git service wasn't completely isolated from the DDOS target.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Pym 14y agoBitbucket?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- hmart 14y agoHardly believe that (Atlassian owned) Bitbucket is doing such attack. Bitbucket offers free private repos, not just git but mercurial hosting. Although way less popular, I think Bitbucket has features to gain ground in the long run without the need of tactics like DDOSes.
- RegEx 14y agoIt was a lame joke, but the amount of "whoosh" in this thread is a bit mind boggling.
- lexy0202 14y agoI'm guessing that that was probably a joke?
- AaronLasseigne 14y agoI believe he was making a joke.
- gilrain 14y agoYes, because a respectable company like Atlassian would risk their entire business to give a small boost to just one of their many products by dealing with black market botnets.
- true_religion 14y agoI can't believe is needs to be said, but that was a joke. It had to be.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jhygnh 14y agofuck them
- angry-hacker 14y agoI know GitHub is down, but how do you know someone is ddosing it?
- lexy0202 14y agohttps://status.github.com/ https://status.github.com/
- eloisius 14y agoProbably someone that wants to practice with their botnet. GitHub is a formidable target.
- danblick 14y agoOn the motives for DDOS attacks - http://www.securelist.com/en/analysis/204792189/DDoS_attacks_in_Q2_2011 http://www.securelist.com/en/analysis/204792189/DDoS_attacks...
- hmart 14y agoOnly a very well orchestrated DDOS using a botnet has the endurance and strength of this attack. One can think that they are distributing some malware through github or that an anti USA hostile government agency is reaping code. Only Github knows.
- click170 14y agoGithub is being DDOS'd? I hadn't noticed. And I use Github. Every day.
- eridius 14y agoYou must not have used it yesterday then ;)
- redegg 14y agoThe typical botnet operator cycle: 1) Send email to <large_site_here>, asking for a large ransom, preferably in Bitcoins. 2) If <large_site_here> does not pay, fire your packet cannons at them. 3) Rinse and repeat.
- Shenglong 14y agoDoes anyone actually pay?
- ihsw 14y agoIf nobody paid then the botnet operators wouldn't continue to try extorting.
- HCIdivision17 14y agoLike spam, botnet operating costs may be so low that hardly anyone at all may need to succumb to make the operation pay off. Someone's likely to cheat and pay to make the pain go away eventually.
- redegg 14y agoIt was actually on Freenode when a botnet operator sent a message to me to pay up or suffer the consequences. I can't remember, but he asked for an insane amount of Bitcoins (800 I think, ~$8400) which wasn't even remotely close to our operating costs. No way I would pay, our site was down 2 days but we moved to Heroku afterwards. No problems since, it probably scared him away. YMMV with bigger botnets.
- HCIdivision17 14y agoWould it be reasonable to think of these expletive redacted botnets as a force of nature? As something useful to harden resources against, or just disasters that you hope don't hit? (I'm thinking of this in terms of sour grapes, not poor planning.)
- freestyler 14y agoMaybe the CVS users.
- dguido 14y agoProbably to watch all of Hacker News squirm.
- dguido 14y agoWhat? You guys don't think that HN is enough troll bait for someone to spend $100 to DDoS a web property you care about?
- randomchars 14y agoWho has grudge on us?
- dguido 14y agoNo grudge necessary. This comment thread is lulzy enough by itself. Watching an entire user community freak out over not being able to access their source code in real time over HTTP is a good enough payoff.
- lallouz 14y agoThis was pretty interesting on launching a massive DDOS and how to stop one. http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4535226 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4535226
- rogerbinns 14y agoMy guess would be a hack of some kind (eg compromising a popular project's code or downloads) and then using the DDOS as a smokescreen. This is something bad guys are increasingly doing with banking hacks - steal the money and then divert everyone's attention with a DDOS. That makes it a lot harder for the victims to find out what happened and distracts the financial institution. More info: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/11/ddos-attacks-spell-gameover-for-banks-victims-in-cyber-heists/ http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/11/ddos-attacks-spell-gameov...
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoThat is fascinating - I have been meaning to revise my security processes and a livecd for banking is a very good idea. So most dos attacks are 1. Put key logger on company x machines 2. Gather banking keys 3. Transfer money 4. Hit with dos and get key logger to do as much damage as poss Only two weaknesses leap out: 1. Two factor authentication - I genuinely do not know at what level a bank stops requiring a separate token for each transaction but it seems silly to ever do that. 2. The money mule - I recently was amazed that directors in Hollywood sometimes accept a percentage of net. But allowing your bank account to be used by some guys on the Internet? Really those two issues seem ... Well with those blockers I would not invest in the internet crime startup. Weird they have bootstrapped quite well
- suresk 14y agoInterestingly, I had a kind of DOS attack on my email account when someone gained access to a credit card account of mine and used it to send money to themselves - I got inundated with hundreds of random emails per second when they were sending money to themselves, so as to make it hard for me to get the notifications and do something about it. Fortunately, the pattern of emails wasn't very sophisticated and I had made a rule to filter them out within a few minutes and had the account closed within 5 minutes, but I can see how this would be a pretty effective tactic against less computer literate targets.
- dguido 14y agoUm, no. The reason they DDoS financial institutions is so they have a chance to cash out the stolen goods immediately. Stolen financial data has an expiration date and the DDoS extends that just long enough for it to be useful. DDoS'ing github because you trojaned a source tree calls attention to the fact that you did it. Only the dumbest of all hackers would do such a thing and that is almost certainly NOT what is happening here. When you trojan a source tree, it only becomes useful after your intended victim downloads and installs it, which can take months or even years.
- mememememememe 14y agoWhy is it so hard to guess? Obviously GitHub is popular. Most popular sites have been DDOSing. People perform DDOS either they hate that site, they want to gain something out of it, or they just want to turn it down for fun. Stop speculating. It's really simple...
- pootch 14y agoOK yes, but who hates GitHub and how could you possibly hate Github enough to bother with going to the trouble? Maybe its just kids who knows but, I guess I never understand why people waste their time doing things that have zero possible positive benefit to themselves.
- mememememememe 14y agoZero possible positives? Ideally, hackers, not crackers, are supposed to HELP companies and organisations to discover their loopholes before it was too late for them. So many attacks are friendly. Many hacker groups (not crackers) would steal stuff and post the irrelevant stuff online just to remind the infrastructure team that they did a bad job. But on the other hands, Github is a popular site, and it attracts many users so people can spawn lots of PC to create mass attack. Why not? It's a popular site so they want to test how well their tools can keep up with GitHub. People would assume that as of today, 2012, operation engineers have learned enough to protect and recover from DDOS. GitHub team did a very good job recovering. Not bad. But certainly the infrastructure is still not able to handle such DDoS. GitHub needs to invest more money on that to secure service. Whatever the reason might be, it's not necessary to speculate. In some movies, we even had banks / investors hired others to crack their own banks or stores next to the bank to destroy critical evidence (financial loss). That's a scam. Maybe we should speculate if it was GitHub's own DDOs? God knows. Everyone will call me crazy if I believe in such thing. No I don't think it was GitHub, but let me remind everyone these strange things happened before in both fiction an real life. But the point I want to make is no one knows and it shouldn't matter. Whoever attacks it is not important at all. GitHub will learn from this and make the service more reliable.
- adgar2 14y agoIf you aren't being DDOSed, you aren't an interesting service.
- trotsky 14y agoWhy does anybody ddos anything? Pretty much the same reason you carve your name in a tree or drive super slow with the bass up so high it sets off everyone's car alarms.
- kfinley 14y agoPages is currently being hit with a DoS attack.[0] I suspect the target maybe a site that is hosted on Github Pages, maybe a blog. The attackers may not be targeting Github directly. [0]: https://status.github.com https://status.github.com
- dclausen 14y agoCould it have something to do with their $100MM sitting in the bank? http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/github-pours-energies-into-enterprise-raises-100-million-from-power-vc-andreesen-horowitz/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/github-pours-energies-into-...