China’s cyberattacks against GitHub have finally ended

The seemingly endless assault against the most popular programming hub has finally come to a close. After several days of fighting off constant DDoS attacks from what appears to have been the Chinese government, GitHub has announced that the attacks have ceased. This comes shortly before President Obama announced some new cybersecurity policies aimed at preventing cyberattacks by foreign governments. 

One of the world’s great coding libraries is safe, for now. As of Tuesday, GitHub, a site that hosts code for programmers, said that a major attack that seemed to come from the Chinese government had subsided. For the last week, GitHub had been overwhelmed by traffic that security experts said originated from China’s Great Firewall. The attack marked a change in the behavior of the filters that block Chinese from viewing foreign websites deemed sensitive or destabilizing. Instead of simply blocking sites, the Great Firewall began redirecting traffic heading for China, and beaming it at GitHub with the intention of overloading it. Known as a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), the attack specifically targeted sites hosted by GitHub that hosted links to sites blocked in China, including The New York Times.