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Distributed denial of service (DDoS) has been a problem for years and it would seem that GitHub just got hit by the biggest attack using the tactic in history. While this development is already disturbing enough, it might be possible that the perpetrators were only using this opportunity to test a bigger, more effective weapon in their arsenal. An even bigger attack could be on the way.
According to the site, the attack came in two waves, the first being worth 1.35Tbps, which would have been enough to overwhelm most domains’ servers. The second was smaller, at 400Gbps, but it would still have been enough to do some damage. As ZDNet points, the biggest DDoS attack before this incident clocked in at 1.1Tbps, which makes GitHub a winner of sorts.
On its engineering page, GitHub provided users with details with regards to the incident and reassured users that no data was compromised during the attack. Based on its own record, it would seem that the attack only caused minor inconvenience and only a short downtime, lasting only a few minutes.
“On Wednesday, February 28, 2018 GitHub.com was unavailable from 17:21 to 17:26 UTC and intermittently unavailable from 17:26 to 17:30 UTC due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. We understand how much you rely on GitHub and we know the availability of our service is of critical importance to our users. To note, at no point was the confidentiality or integrity of your data at risk. We are sorry for the impact of this incident and would like to describe the event, the efforts we’ve taken to drive availability, and how we aim to improve response and mitigation moving forward,” GitHub wrote.
As to what makes this particular attack unique, it would seem that the perpetrators used memcached traffic that’s based on UDP, which amplified the power of the DDoS strike. The two consecutive strikes were basically meant to take advantage of vulnerabilities in this particular aspect. According to security firm Akamai, this incident revealed a new method of attack for hackers, which could make it more popular.
