MANILA, Philippines –Software development platform GitHub, the victim of a prolonged distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack noted on Tuesday, March 31, that its attempts to mitigate the attack were finally working, with the service resuming stability.

Hour 118: Mitigation remains effective and service is stable.

— GitHub Status (@githubstatus) March 31, 2015

The service interruption for GitHub began more than 118 hours earlier on Thursday, when large volumes of web traffic were sent to the site.

According to a PC World report, the web traffic appeared to be sent to attack two Chinese anti-censorship projects hosted on the service: a mirror of The New York Times for Chinese users and a Greatfire.org project that sought to develop ways for Chinese Internet users to circumvent restrictions and access banned services. 

China blocks a large number of websites through what people have called the “Great Firewall.” The “Great Firewall” is a set of networking equipment and filtering software that restricts access to thousands of sites, including media outlets like Bloomberg and The New York Times and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

According to a blogpost by Anth@x on Insight Labs, the cause of the DDoS attack was a form of browser hijacking. PCWorld explained that “advertising and tracking code used by many Chinese websites appeared to have been modified in order to attack the GitHub pages of the two software projects.”

Anthr@x added, “even people outside China are being weaponized to target things the Chinese government does not like, for example, freedom of speech.”

While the attack from that source has stopped, a postmortem analysis led network security monitoring and forensics firm Netresec to conclude that the attack demonstrated “how the vast passive and active network filtering infrastucture in China, known as the Great Firewall of China or ‘GFW,’ can be used in order to perform powerful DDoS attacks.”

The post added, “the GFW cannot be considered just a technology for inspecting and censoring the Internet traffic of Chinese citizens, but also a platform for conducting DDoS attacks against targets world wide with help of innocent users visiting Chinese websites.” – Rappler.com

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