GitHub Crippled By 'Largest DDoS Attack' In Its History, All Fingers Point To China

A mere two weeks after Google decided to pull the plug on Google Code, competitor GitHub is experiencing the "largest DDoS attack" in the site's history. While the company itself isn't coming out with it, Baidu acknowledges that a great deal of traffic is coming from China.

On GitHub's site, we're told that the attack began on Thursday, and while a number of common attack vectors are being exploited, some new techniques have been brought in: namely, unsuspecting people are having their traffic rerouted and are in effect contributing to the attack.

At this point, the blame points to China. GitHub has said that the goal of the attack is to convince the site to remove certain content, and The Wall Street Journal reports that it's because GitHub hosts anti-censorship tools that help Chinese citizens break through the Great Firewall of China.

The way this is known is that the traffic was specifically directed towards two pages on GitHub that host such tools, so it's not exactly hard to jump to conclusions as to who the culprit is. GitHub seems intent on leaving the software up, but meanwhile is trying everything in its power to mitigate the explosive surge of traffic. We'd imagine that since Baidu is aware of the attack, it will make an effort to slow things down, as well.