GitHub, the world’s famous web-based hosting service for version control using Git has revealed that it became a victim of a DDoS cyber attack last week. The website which is mostly used for computer coding reported that the hackers took over its server’s memory systems by ‘memcaching’ and amplified the volume of data by 51k times pronouncing a traffic mega peak hitting the cloud platform at 1.35TB per second at one point of time.
The spokesperson for the website which has over 20 million users also admitted that another similar attack by DDoS occurred last month when the website of the national tax office in the Netherlands went offline.
Last year, an attack of similar sort targeted the country’s largest banks like ABN Amro, ING, and Rabobank.
The US Intelligence claims that the number of Memcached attacks was very low until the start of this month.
Renowned content delivery company of US Cloudflare says that most of the servers’ vulnerable to Memcached attacks are operating in North America and Europe.
Note- GitHub is also known as Logical Awesome LLC and is known to offer distributed version control and source code management functionality of Git to users. The service provider is also known to provide access control and several collaboration features such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management and Wikipedia related services for every project.
In one of the tweets, Steve Wolmac, an Amazon Network Engineer said that his company has tackled Memcached problems with sophistication last year and so hopes that his company’s network will never come into the vector of future cyber attacks of such scale.
Companies like Digital Ocean, OVH and Linode also have certain security policies in place to tackle such situations.
