DDoS attack on GitHub has stopped? Status is green again.

timdorr · on March 31, 2015

https://github.com/greatfire and https://github.com/cn-nytimes have both returned to normal as well.

snsr · on March 31, 2015

I'm still seeing the unicorn via those URLs.

MollyR · on March 31, 2015

Yea I can't seem to get to those pages either.

Update: its working now, but it was definitely not working earlier.

smurfpandey · on March 31, 2015

It's working from my end.

dak1 · on March 31, 2015

I'm also unable to access the two repos that were apparently the target of the PRC's ire: https://github.com/cn-nytimes and https://github.com/greatfire

Is this simply a temporary precautionary measure because of the initial JS DDOS, or has GitHub permanently taken those two repos down?

If it's the latter, then I'm really disappointed and it would seem the PRC was able to get what it wanted.

micah_chatt · on March 31, 2015

Interestingly, GitHub seem's to be allowing logged-in users to access those pages, but using a incongnito tab shows unicorns. I'm guessing they've just disabled access for unauthenticated requests.

andor436 · on March 31, 2015

Aha, you're right! Same behavior for me.

smurfpandey · on March 31, 2015

Both repos are still up and accessible from my end (India).

andor436 · on March 31, 2015

They're there for me (I'm in the US-midwest.)

remi · on March 31, 2015

https://twitter.com/githubstatus/status/582862783827591168

ryannevius · on March 31, 2015

Maybe...but it was green a couple of times on March 27 as well. Time will tell.

johnnyfaehell · on March 31, 2015

I think it's more they're no longer worried about it evolving any more.

NamTaf · on March 31, 2015

They had said in their updates that they'd leave it yellow until it subsided.

https://status.github.com/messages

cotillion · on March 31, 2015

They're still hiding behind Prolexic/Akamai. I suspect the attacker is waiting for them to drop that protection.

From a state sponsored attacker I would have expected to see a BGP attack..

tux3 · on March 31, 2015

A BGP attack would be a whole new level of "This is war", probably with a bit more consequences.

_rrnv · on March 31, 2015

Does anybody have any wider context regarding this attack? Is it the first time a massive DDoS like that was mitigated, with just minor disruptions to the victim?

lordbusiness · on March 31, 2015

Not by a long-shot; this was reported as a big deal (and I'd love to have more insight and data available), but this kind of thing has been going on for many years.

Ask your local DNS admin for some war stories. :-)

pyre · on March 31, 2015

It also gained notoriety because it seemed like an attempt by a Chinese actor (possibly the PRC) to force Github to take down two repositories that helped to circumvent the Great Firewall.

Github itself has weathered DDoS attacks before, but I'm not sure how different this attack was in scale.

sanxiyn · on March 31, 2015

https://github.com/blog/1981-large-scale-ddos-attack-on-gith... explicitly states that "We are currently experiencing the largest DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack in github.com's history".

zmk · on March 31, 2015

Prologue:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/19/anti-censorship-service-gre...

See links around this article, similar attacks have happened before:

http://www.netresec.com/?page=Blog&month=2015-03&post=China%...