Who is DDOSing GitHub and why?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4677258

by pootch • 14 years ago

86 66 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

sejje• 14 years ago

They're not overly successful--I've had some slow page loads, but no serious interruption of service.

zalew• 14 years ago

I noticed yesterday I can't install anything through https://, git:// urls work fine

eridius2• 14 years ago

You sure it was https? For a short time they blocked port 80 specifically so git:// and https:// would be able to work.

Pym• 14 years ago

Bitbucket?

hmart2• 14 years ago

Hardly 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.

lexy02022• 14 years ago

I'm guessing that that was probably a joke?

AaronLasseigne• 14 years ago

I believe he was making a joke.

RegEx• 14 years ago

It was a lame joke, but the amount of "whoosh" in this thread is a bit mind boggling.

gilrain• 14 years ago

Yes, 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• 14 years ago

I can't believe is needs to be said, but that was a joke. It had to be.

angry-hacker• 14 years ago

I know GitHub is down, but how do you know someone is ddosing it?

lexy02022• 14 years ago

https://status.github.com/

eloisius• 14 years ago

Probably someone that wants to practice with their botnet. GitHub is a formidable target.

danblick• 14 years ago

On the motives for DDOS attacks - http://www.securelist.com/en/analysis/204792189/DDoS_attacks...

hmart2• 14 years ago

Only 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.

ihsw2• 14 years ago

How does one spread malware through github when the website (and all it's services) are down?

mansoor-s• 14 years ago

I'm dying from laughter

click170• 14 years ago

Github is being DDOS'd? I hadn't noticed. And I use Github. Every day.

eridius2• 14 years ago

You must not have used it yesterday then ;)

redegg4• 14 years ago

The 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.

Shenglong2• 14 years ago

Does anyone actually pay?

ihsw2• 14 years ago

If nobody paid then the botnet operators wouldn't continue to try extorting.

redegg4• 14 years ago

It 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.

zomgbbq• 14 years ago

I believe that most people pay. It is perceived to be cheaper to pay off the extortionists than to mitigate the DoS attack.

colinbartlett• 14 years ago

Wait, seriously? Is this a common thing? I've not heard a lot of noise about ransom demands.

Kiro• 14 years ago

I don't know if it's common but I can confirm it happened to us at least.

xal2• 14 years ago

It's very common to target ecommerce stores like this. Specifically jewellery stores for some reason. Probably because it's a luxury good and somehow botnet owners link that to wealth of the owners. We host tens of thousands ecommerce stores and sometimes get these forwarded. We estimate that our customers receive at least one a month. DDOS attacks are a weekly to bi-weekly occurance for us.

The internet is a messy place.

tptacek• 14 years ago

It is very common; these scams were the bane of online casinos a few years ago, and hit major financial services companies more recently.

Sorry, did I say "scam"? I meant "digital equivalent of a sit-in".

antimatter• 14 years ago

The company I work for owns a site which has a niche community of buyers and sellers. There is a particular guy on there who has a reputation of scaming other users. When the users complain and post negative feedback about him, he threatens our company and follows through with DDoS attacks until the negative feedback/comments about him are removed.

freestyler• 14 years ago

Maybe the CVS users.

troels• 14 years ago

Nah, they wouldn't launch a distributed dos attack, would they now?

vukmir• 14 years ago

That's exactly what they want you to believe.

Never underestimate the frightening power of a large number of evildoers hitting F5.

dguido5• 14 years ago

Probably to watch all of Hacker News squirm.

dguido5• 14 years ago

What? 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• 14 years ago

Who has grudge on us?

lallouz• 14 years ago

This was pretty interesting on launching a massive DDOS and how to stop one. http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4535226

rogerbinns3• 14 years ago

My 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-gameov...

lifeisstillgood• 14 years ago

That 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• 14 years ago

Interestingly, 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.

dguido5• 14 years ago

Um, 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.

rogerbinns3• 14 years ago

If you DDOS GitHub as a whole, how does that call attention to the one project a bad guy has trojaned?

If the project has mostly "commercial" developers then chances are they work on it during the week. DDOS GitHub during the week and let off for the weekend. That gives a few days worth for your trojan to be downloaded by the unsuspecting. People will also have tired hearing about the "github news" so new news about trojaning will take a little longer to disperse.

mememememememe3• 14 years ago

Why 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• 14 years ago

OK 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.

mememememememe3• 14 years ago

Zero 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• 14 years ago

If you aren't being DDOSed, you aren't an interesting service.

trotsky• 14 years ago

Why 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• 14 years ago

  Pages 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

dclausen• 14 years ago

Could it have something to do with their $100MM sitting in the bank?

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/github-pours-energies-into-...

Who is DDOSing GitHub and why?

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