How GitHub Survived the Biggest DDoS Attack Ever Recorded?

Yagmur Sahin
Technology Hits
Published in
5 min readNov 6, 2021

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Analysis of GitHub Attack in connection with cyber security concepts.

GitHub, a famous online code management site used by millions of developers, was the subject of one of the largest verifiable DDoS attacks on record. This attack had a throughput of 1.3 Tbps, transmitting 126.9 million packets per second.

There were no botnets participating in the GitHub DDoS attack because it was a memcached DDoS strike. Instead, the attackers took use of the amplification effect of memcached, a prominent database caching technology. The attackers were able to increase their attack by a factor of 50,000 by flooding memcached servers with faked queries.

Fortunately, GitHub was utilizing a DDoS protection service, which was promptly notified of the attack within 10 minutes of it beginning. This alert initiated the mitigation process, and GitHub was able to immediately stop the attack. The enormous DDoS attack lasted roughly 20 minutes in total.

Summary:

On February 28, 2018, Github was the victim of the largest DDoS attack ever recorded in human history. The attackers took advantage of a caching system known as Memchached. In this DDoS attack, the attackers used the “growth factor” in the Memcached.

Target:

In short, Target was the GitHub services.

GitHub.com web-site became unavailable for a while between UTC 17:21–17:26 and the attack was thought…

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Yagmur Sahin
Technology Hits

London 📍 Lawyer | Privacy & Data Protection Professional | Philosophy-Psychology-Tech Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/data-privacy-yagmursahin/