GitHub Among Victims of Massive DDoS Attack Wave

GitHub has informed users of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which brought down the site from 17:21 to 17:26 UTC and made it sporadically unavailable from 17:26 to 17:30 UTC. The incident did not compromise the confidentiality or integrity of users' data, it reports.

In a first, attackers last month exploited unsecured Memcached servers to amplify DDoS attacks against target organizations. Memcached is open-source software used among many businesses to increase servers' performance speed; however, it's not always used securely. Organizations often deploy Memcached hosts so they're accessible to the public Internet and all attackers have to do is search for hosts and use them to direct high-volume DDoS traffic.

GitHub identified and mitigated the Feb. 28 attack, which came from more than 1,000 unique autonomous systems (ASNs) across tens of thousands of different endpoints. The amplification attack used the memcached approach and peaked at 1.35Tbps via 126.9 million packets per second. One facility had an increase in inbound transit bandwidth exceeding 100Gbps.

The site tells users it's investigating the use of monitoring infrastructure to automate enabling DDoS mitigation providers.

Read more details here.

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