Categories: NewsTechnology

GitHub Attacked By Government-Backed Chinese Hackers, Sources Claim

GitHub, the largest online code repository used by millions around the world has reported that it is still facing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and the website is on ‘high alert’. Last week, GitHub went down after massive hacking attacks were launched on the largest coding repo. GitHub accepted that the recent attack is the largest and most sophisticated attack in Github’s history. The Twitter and Facebook pages of GitHub says that the current status and availability of GitHub website is 100%, but the admin of the repo is taking all necessary measures to avoid any outage, as the attacks are ongoing.

It is also reported by a number of news sources that the latest attacks on GitHub were launched by Chinese hackers. The hackers are continuing to evolve and improve their techniques, according to GitHub’s official statement. They are using redirection techniques from two of the most visited pages in China from the China’s search engine Baidu. The first page from where the traffic is being redirected is the New York Time’s Chinese news language pages, whereas the other one is Greatfire.org, an information website which tells about the government censorship in China.

The Wall Street Journal quotes some sources which are now claiming that the attacks are directly coming from the high-level official internet infrastructure within China, which points towards the speculation that the hacking attack is done by government-backed Chinese hackers. Baidu, the Chinese search engine has released a statement, denying the notion that its systems are being used in the GitHub DDos attack.

Published by
Fahad Saleem