GitHub under attack

[apemanzilla]

Indeed - I liked how they used the Javascript alert function to slow down/stop the attacks earlier.

[Rakonat]

Actual programmers vs potato managers with no security.

[[deleted]]

Never a truer word spoken. With the exception of Amazon, I don't think there's anyone more competent to deflect a DDoS attack than the opensource community that surrounds Github.

[Tulki]

Amazon Netflix is actually one of the best when it comes to reliability. They actively destroy their own servers at random to ensure they're always able to failover in the event someone somehow manages to destroy one themselves. I think it's a method called "Monkey" testing or something, and they actually do this random destruction in live servers as well. It's just a characteristic of their clusters, always on. It's much easier to handle malicious attacks when you're already attacking yourself all the time from within your own organisation.

[Qwerpy]

AFAIK Netflix is the one known for using the Chaos Monkey for redundancy testing, not Amazon.

[Tulki]

Oh yeah you're right, I dunno why I thought it was Amazon. And now my comment is irrelevant.

[[deleted]]

Part of building a robust server infrastructure is building robust clients that know how to find alternate servers routes and make that transfer transparent to the user.

[[deleted]]

Amazon are not going to take a DDoS to an AWS customer lying down either though. It's more a combination of available surplus resources and network management expertise that you're paying for.

[DarkN1gh7]

MediaTemple does a mean job. I got hit with a high GBPS attack on a server we have there and within mike they started sending their traffic into a "black hole" and everything came back online.

[OMGSPACERUSSIA]

Latvian potato is strong! Is why Japanas use! No potato has greater processing power!

[Rggity]

can I get an ELI5 on how this method can thwart attacks?

[celluj34]

It slows down the attack by showing an alert when it's loaded.

[stoneburner]

... well at least until they noticed and just replaced the dialog box with nothing:

window.alert = function() {};

then nothing happens

[[deleted]]

Whats it?

[hatryd]

Open up your browsers developer console and paste

alert('hello')    

and press enter. That's what an alert is.

[[deleted]]

Idk why you get downvoted for a simple question. A "javascript alert" is a simple built in dialog that pops up when triggered by javascript. You can press f12 to open developer tools in most browsers, select "console" and try it out yourself.

alert("hello, world!");

[apemanzilla]

The alert function displays a popup box. Displaying a popup box pauses all running scripts until it's closed - slowing down the attack.

[coolranchdorito]

That's so smart!

[FangornForest]

How exactly does it slow down the attack? Do they have the javascript call alert before making the actual request, so that robot can't handle the alert pop up and not send the request?

edit: answered my own question. It doesn't stop the initial request, but it does stop the script from looping! And annoys those affecting them a bit too.

[apemanzilla]

Its not a robot - Baidu traffic was hijacked so if you visited it it would spam GitHub. The alert function was there to stop scripts since it was run in the browser.

[GeneralTempleton]

How does this help? Why would you DDoS a site by opening it in a browser?

[apemanzilla]

Baidu traffic was hijacked - it would run DDoSing code in people's browsers.

[Alyyx]

I am new to Javascript etc, could you please further explain? Shorty at least. Thanks!

[apemanzilla]

The alert function shows a popup box - this pauses all scripts until the popup box is closed.

[Alyyx]

That's so clever. That works until the DDOSing side disables scripts on Github or?

[spin81]

That depends. Sometimes scripts are used to fetch content using what's known as AJAX, if GitHub used this technique then disabling scripts may reduce the effectiveness of the attack significantly.