April 02, 2015
One of the world’s great coding libraries is safe, for now.
As of Tuesday, GitHub, a site that hosts code for programmers, said that a major attack that seemed to come from the Chinese government had subsided.
For the last week, GitHub had been overwhelmed by traffic that security experts said originated from China’s Great Firewall. The attack marked a change in the behavior of the filters that block Chinese from viewing foreign websites deemed sensitive or destabilizing.
Instead of simply blocking sites, the Great Firewall began redirecting traffic heading for China, and beaming it at GitHub with the intention of overloading it. Known as a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), the attack specifically targeted sites hosted by GitHub that hosted links to sites blocked in China, including The New York Times.
Though it’s unclear why the attacks stopped, the change in tack came just a day before President Obama authorized financial sanctions against malicious overseas hackers and companies that knowingly benefit from cyber-espionage.
Analysts said the attack marked a dangerous change in strategy, that threatens free speech online. Instead of simply blocking traffic entering China, the new approach aggressively goes after sites outside of China’s borders deemed objectionable by Beijing.
Long in the works, the new policy move by President Obama was unlikely designed to address attacks like the one on GitHub. Nonetheless, the attacks could prove a new issue in an already fractious relationship between the United States and China over cyberattacks.
