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Attackers launched the biggest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack ever against code hosting site GitHub on Wednesday. At its peak, the cyberattack flooded GitHub servers with 1.35 Tb of traffic per second. Previously, the biggest DDoS attack ever was the Mirai botnet assault against blogger Brian Krebs in 2016; that attack peaked at 628 Gbps of traffic.
The GitHub attack did not come from a botnet; instead, it used misconfigured memcached servers from all over the world. The activity was particularly strong in Europe, leading some to speculate that someone in Eastern Europe might have caused the attack, but no one really knows.
For help in mitigating the attack, GitHub turned to Akamai, which resolved the problems within eight minutes. As a result, the attack was only a very minor inconvenience for some developers and open source projects.
