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Github DDoS Attack As Seen By Google
New submitter opensec writes: Last month GitHub was hit by a massive DDoS attack originating from China. On this occasion the public discovered that the NSA was not the only one with a QUANTUM-like capability. China has its own "Great Cannon" that can inject malicious JavaScript inside HTTP traffic. That weapon was used in the GitHub attack. People using Baidu services were unwitting participants in the denial of service, their bandwidth used to flood the website. But such a massive subversion of the Internet could not evade Google's watchful eye. Niels Provos, engineer at Google, tells us how it happened. Showing that such attacks cannot be made covertly, Provos hopes that the public shaming will act as a deterrent.
I sometimes work in some shared office space. I'm there to work on my PhD thesis, but a lot of the other people there are Ruby on Rails hipsters. The stereotypes about these people are true. They do wear fedoras, they do speak negatively of women, they are very opinionated, and pretty much none of them have any formal education (a number of them are even high school dropouts). Anyway, you wouldn't believe how angry these people got when this GitHub DDoS nonsense broke. They were actually screaming and yelling about it. Some of them were probably close to foaming at the mouth with anger, they were so displeased. I started to realize that Git and GitHub aren't just tools to these people. Git and GitHub have replaced religion for these folks. Maybe they don't worship Jesus or Allah, but they do worship Git and GitHub. It was kind of unnerving to see how seriously they take Git and GitHub, and it was disturbing to see how much anger this DDoS crap brought out in them.