GitHub is getting DDoSed again

It may be time for GitHub to build out multiple availability data centers and use BGP as an anycast tool. We do this. I have public facing IPv4 space that is announced from multiple facilities. Having an IP address hosted from multiple facilities is a powerful tool. This allows providers to hit our datacenter through the least amount of ASN routes. We original did this to minimize latency and create faster regional transaction processing. As an added benefit - DDoS traffic also gets routed to the nearest facility "load balancing" a DDoS so that it only affects a single facility or it splits up the 10gbps of traffic among many facilities if it is coming from many sources. O'Reilly's BGP book has a great chapter on "Anycast."<p>From the sounds of it their architecture may not support this. If they had a SAN solution capable of replication to multiple data centers like HP LeftHand's product or a multiple master DRBD configuration they may be able to host github from multiple active datacenters and announce the block equally so that providers route traffic to them because their ASN is closest.<p>Who knows, maybe they do all of this?

This happened back in October a couple of days in a row. Who the heck is targeting Github and why? I wonder if these attacks are related to the Chinese hacking attacks that have been publicised lately?

There are people who suggest that a DDoS is just a 'digital sit in', a legitimate way for someone to air a grievance, if they think the targets (or world) haven't paid them enough attention.<p>This view makes DDoS seem more normal or even romantic/heroic, and spreads the tools/know-how more widely. So, pulling off a DDoS becomes a more plausible and attractive aspiration, for a larger set of surly people with marginal reasoning skills and destructive impulses.<p>The DDoS tactic should be rejected as dishonorable censorship and vandalism, no matter the cause under which it is launched.

Are we sure it's a DDoS or is it some sort of massively distributed scrape of the repos? (Side-effect being DDoS regardless)<p>I'm starting to think this is some kind of grab for intellectual property; maybe even a targetting of private repos to somehow gain access.

Reading status.github.com over the last few weeks, I found it interesting how often little things were broken at Github. It's like every few days, a small part of the site is unavailable or the sysadmins are investigating this or that connectivity issue. I guess when you're as big as Github, keeping your site live and operational is completely nontrivial.

I consider it evidence that when some punk figures out how to make a black hole, we're done for. No reason necessary.

Bitbucket at it again.

Is it just me or has github been down a lot in the later months (moreso than a year ago)? DDoS or otherwise, it doesn't inspire confidence, especially for paid accounts (which I considered but ultimately decided to go with another solution)

Maybe they should use CloudFlare?

Good plan. When a site is DDoSed, encourage thousands of HN viewers to check it out :P

Hm, just a couple of days later after another potential security exploit is published... maybe they did not plug all the holes, and someone is trying to clone all private repositories as soon as possible... hogging the servers in the process.

Who would have the motivation to hack GitHub?

Meanwhile at Bitbucket... <a href="http://status.bitbucket.org/" rel="nofollow">http://status.bitbucket.org/</a>

Still not working, trying to load the page of a private repo, keeps loading and loading.

Who &#60;i&#62;does&#60;/i&#62; that?

This is a pretty typical occurrence for a web service provider of their size. When is Github going to be able to not fail when targeted?

If several countries, distribute across various continents, have managed to put in place three-strikes and six-strikes (not that I think it's good), it means that the one and foremost knee-jerking argument saying <i>"You can't do anything about DDoS because: [X] It's technically not realist"</i> is gone.<p>Technically now ISPs could throttle the bandwith (or even disallow net access) to zombies boxen used in DDoS attacks in all the countries applying "x-strikes" rules.<p>So there <i>may</i> be light at the end of the tunnel.<p>It's not exactly as if DDoS was a fatality and nothing could be done about it.

I think GitHub should add hardcore anti-scraping functionality. Even though I enjoy Opensource repositories, I wouldn't like some bot/govermnent or other evil to mess with all of our contributions to humanity in a way to defeat us.