GitHub boasts around 20 million online users, most commonly used for open-source coding projects. It has the largest host of source code in the world.

The web-hosting service revealed the attack that was targeted on Github in a blog post earlier this week. This is the largest-known cyber attack in the history ever reported.

The firm stated:

“It suffered a distributed denial-of-service [DDoS] attack on February 28.”

DDoS attacks have been on a rise recently. A DDoS attack bombards websites with enough traffic to put them down or suspend it. According to what GitHub revealed, the attackers took over a memory system known as ‘memcaching’ and amplified the volume of data by 51,000 times. This means with every byte of data sent by the attacker, 51KB was sent to the target. The most surprising was the traffic hitting the platform at 1.35 TB per second at its peak.

The Blog quoted:

“The attack originated from over a thousand different autonomous systems [ASNs] across tens of thousands of unique endpoints..…During the 8min attack, at no point was any of its customers’ data at risk.“

Another similar attack by DDoS occurred last month when the website of the national tax office in the Netherlands went offline. The DDoS attack had targeted the country’s largest banks like ABN Amro, ING, and Rabobank.

The US Director of National Intelligence, Daniel Coats made the comments during a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee:

“The intelligence chief cited DDoS attacks among a list of actions he expects North Korea to use against the US for offensive operations.”

Bret, a GitHub user commented on a social media,

“Hackers attacking github…. seems almost traitorous.”

John Baller, a social observer commented:

“More likely Google or Microsoft, even Yahoo or GoDaddy could be behind this. Open Source…I mean, come on! GitHub is a host for great open source projects that over threw paid competition.”

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