Cybercriminals Take Aim at GitHub, Website Disrupted by DDOS Attack

A distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack hit GitHub a few hours ago, causing the code sharing website to experience temporary outages.

Initially, GitHub representatives claimed that the site was down because of “connectivity issues,” but they later revealed that a DDOS attack was behind the incident.

“We've temporarily disabled service on port 80 while we investigate the source of a connection flood. HTTPS, GIT, and SSH service are unaffected,” read a message on the site’s status page shortly after the attack started.

Currently, the website appears to be working properly, but its administrators reveal that they’re looking into new mitigation strategies to ensure that they’re better prepared against such attacks in the future.

The origins of this particular attack have not been disclosed, but this is not the first time when cybercriminals take aim at the repository. Back in February, an even bigger DDOS attack hit GitHub.

At the time, they claimed to have deployed more effective protection systems, which may explain why this attack only disrupted the website for a short period.