In total, GitHub was offline for five minutes between 17:21 to 17:26 UTC, with intermittent connectivity between 17:26 to 17:30 UTC. Following eight minutes of the assault, the attackers called it off and the DDoS stopped. GitHub called in assistance from Akamai Prolexic, which rerouted traffic to GitHub through its “scrubbing” centers, which removed and blocked data deemed to be malicious. GitHub’s inbound traffic skyrocketed during the attack Wired reports that, in this instance, the memcached systems used amplified the data volumes by around 50 times. To do that, they initially spoofed GitHub’s IP address and took control of memcached instances that GitHub said are “inadvertently accessible on the public internet.” In a blog post retelling the incident, GitHub said the attackers hijacked something called “memcaching” - a distributed memory system known for high-performance and demand - to massively amplify the traffic volumes that were being fired at GitHub.

GitHub is a common target - the Chinese government was widely suspected to be behind a five-day-long attack in 2015 - and this newest assault tipped the scales at an incredible 1.35Tbps at peak. It’s a fairly common tactic used to force targets offline. In a growing sign of the increased sophistication of both cyber attacks and defenses, GitHub has revealed that this week it weathered the largest-known DDoS attack in history.ĭDoS - or distributed denial of service in full - is a cyber attack that aims to bring websites and web-based services down by bombarding them with so much traffic that their services and infrastructure are unable to handle it all.

Ip ddos github