Coding Website GitHub Hit With DDoS Attack, China Suspected

Over in China censorship of certain content online and speaking out against the government are activities that the authorities over there don’t look upon favorably, which is why it isn’t surprising to find popular websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, and more are banned from being accessed by the general population.

That being said a coding website in the US – GitHub – has recently come under attack courtesy of a DDoS which apparently has been routing traffic meant for China’s most popular search engine to the website. Given the massive population of China, we can only imagine that this would be an insane amount of traffic that the website would have to deal with in a short matter of time. This has resulted in the website being paralyzed for periods at a time.

The traffic has been directed to two specific GitHub pages that have been banned in China, according to security experts. One of those websites is Greatfire.org which helps Chinese users circumvent government censorship, and the other basically linked to a Chinese language version of The New York Times’s website. The attacks are said to have begun on Thursday and are still ongoing at this time of writing.

GitHub has declined to comment on what the attack was targeting or who might be behind it, although in a blog post they noted, “Based on reports we’ve received, we believe the intent of this attack is to convince us to remove a specific class of content.” The Cyberspace Administration of China has yet to comment on the matter as well.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Web
Tags: China, Hacking, Security