[ihuman]

Who would try to disable github?

[tonfa]

Back in 2009 when it happened to bitbucket, this was afaik due to hosting a particular project (hurting bitbucket was a side effect of hurting this particular project, some communities seems to be happy to resolve issues with DDoS attacks...).

[boomzilla]

It could just be some rogue deployment script running from EC2 that are a little more active that it should be. Imagine someone is deploying their 1GB repo from GitHub to 100 small EC2 instances :)

[Cherian]

My startup cucumbertown.com is hit with similar issues.

Initially we blocked all Ec2[1] & spamhaus ip list. But then realized Flipboard proxies[2], some blog aggregation proxies etc are based on Ec2 machines.

What would be a good way to block such rogue machines? Is there a community sponsored list or Ec2/Rackspace ips that are creating issues?

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1528

http://flipboard.com/browserproxy/

[Caballera]

Banks were being hit the first week of October, then I know some VoIP servers were being hit such as Callcentric by DDoS. I can see why the banks were hit, but not why so many much smaller businesses are being attacked.

[RileyJames]

I would think being small(er) and having 100M in the bank makes github a pretty good target, unfortunately.

[i386]

I don't think so. If you we're hosting GitHub you would figure out pretty easily if it was related to cloning a specific repo from AWS and just disable the account hosting the repo.

[tegansnyder]

Thank is exactly what I was thinking. Who in their right mind would want to do that?

[maratd]

Someone who wants to test the limits of their botnet and technique. Can you think of a more tech savvy target?

[SethMurphy]

Attacking a rails application, you would be proud of that? Rails sites are not exactly known for their performance.

[donavanm]

DDOSs are typically defeated through buying lots and lots of transit. That's an exercise in outspending your adversary.

A small entity like github should be trivial to saturate.

[lucisferre]

Amazon.

[bkanber]

Amazon has a service outage every time you look at it funny, much less a DDoS...

hyuk, hyuk

[adgar2]

Google. Amazon. Microsoft. Apple. Facebook. Most startups.

[tensor]

Most startups? Name even one startup in the same league as the others you've named.

[Tipzntrix]

I know a few governments who would be more than happy for github to be disabled.

[JoeCortopassi]

Care to elaborate why GitHub would be a target for a state sponsored DDOS attack? Seems a little far-fetched, for a website that is virtually unknown outside of the developer community

[Tipzntrix]

While not as famous as Tor in Iran, for example, there are VPN implementations on GitHub, in addition to what rcthompson said.

[rcthompson]

In the broadest sense, github is a site where anyone can upload and publicize any file of reasonable size. Depending on who is uploading what, that could easily make them a target.

[moe]

In the broadest sense, about 10 million web-forums and similar sites also match your description...

Why would they go for github of all things?

[Dirlewanger]

There's some statistic out there somewhere from some paper which found out that like 3 out of every 4 (or something ridiculous like that) cyber attack on the US government comes from China so...it's not that farfetched.

[dbaupp]

I don't quite see how that is relevant to a non-US government entity like GitHub.

[chrixian]

it was sourceforge

[rorrr]

It's the standard weapon of botnet blackmail. Target a large site, bring it down, ask for money.

Fighting DDoS attacks is not trivial, especially if you're against a sophisticated botnet, and your code has multiple slow parts.