GitHub Investigating DDoS Attack Against Code-Sharing Website

LONDON -- GitHub, the code-sharing website, says it is investigating what appears to be a distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyberattack from an unknown source, months after it was hit by a similar attack that was linked to the Chinese government.

GitHub, which is based in San Francisco, updated its status page Thursday morning at 10 a.m. IST to say: "We're investigating what appears to be a DDoS attack." A subsequent update at 10:31 a.m. IST revealed that systems put in place to mitigate such attacks were effective, adding later: "We continue to monitor while we mitigate a DDoS atack. All services are operational."

No other information has been provided by the company, though International Business Times was able to access all parts of the site at the time of publication. The website also appears to be unaffected according to the website IsItDownRightNow.

A DDoS attack typically sees an attacker try and overwhelm the servers of the victim, knocking them offline and preventing anyone from accessing the service or website. While GitHub may be experiencing a DDoS attack, its users may not notice as it likely has improved its DDoS protection in the wake of previous attacks, and therefore is able to deflect attacks before they impact the end user.

Over the last six months, GitHub has been hit by a number of cyberattacks. The biggest of these came at the end of March when a massive DDoS attack knocked the website offline for up to five days and was linked to the Chinese government. In August the repository was again hit by a DDoS attack but to date the attacker has not been identified.