• CritterNYC comments on Github may be inaccessible today due to a DDoS attack by the Chinese government using Baidu
    https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/30hk3l/github_may_be_inaccessible_today_due_to_a_ddos/cpsk8z4

    From a few different analysis oh HN and elsewhere... Baidu has an analytics product and an ads product, much like Google Analytics and Google AdSense, which are used on all kinds of websites via Javascript. China has set the Great Firewall of China to modify some of Baidu’s assets so that any non-Chinese IP gets a modified version of the Baidu analytics and ad code. The modification causes every web browser visiting a Chinese site using a Baidu analytics/ad product to load files from the greatfire and cn-nytimes projects on github (both of which are designed to circumvent Chinese government censorship) once every 2 seconds. The effect is that people all over the world outside of China are unwilling participants in a DDoS against github.

    github has responded by taking both projects offline and replacing their content with a simple Javascript alert that shows a “WARNING: malicious javascript detected on this domain” messagebox. This causes the folks visiting baidu-infected sites to see the alert and know something is wrong with the website (hopefully not visiting it again). It also prevents the malicious Javascript from executing in a loop and reloading the site every 2 seconds.

    One takeaway is that you should always have a backup of your code and resources outside a single central site like github. Another is that you should never ever have any webpage configured to load any resources from a server hosted within China IP address space as it is vulnerable to this sort of attack by the Chinese government.

    #github #china #ddos #security