The popular programming and app developing website Github was hit by a DDoS attack recently and the website is still trying to recover from the attack.
A DDoS attack, or Distributed Denial of Service, is making a website or personnal IP address unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple services. The website believes this was coordinated by individuals in China that don't like some of the customers of Github specifically ones that promote free speech and promoting banned websites in China like the New York Times website.
DDoS attacks are becoming more and more rampant these days. I keep up with online pro gamers who deal with this problem very often. One minute they are streaming for thousands of people and the next they are being hit offline by an attack to their IP address by, most of the time, some pimple faced teenager living in the basement of their parents house.
These are just some of the ways that DDoS attacks are implemented. According to digitalattackmap.com there are four main types of attacks. A TCP connection attack is when all available connections are used up and the system goes down. A volumetric attack involves using up bandwidth and are mainly used to simply cause confusion between the internet and a network. A fragmentation attack is a flood of packets is sent to a network and causes poor performance among other issues. An application attack is used to target a specific area of an application and handicap it with few attacking devices.
Regardless of what type of attack is presented DDoSing, as some would call it, is troublesome and easily accomplished by even an unseasoned hacker. As soon as you find a fix another attack could take place at a different angle. For computer professionals this will continue to be a problem for the foreseeable future.
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