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Ask HN: Why isn't the GitHub attack being covered by the news?

• mobinni 12y ago
  Well maybe no one at Github is allowed to contact local news sources, and if they can't get a quote or information from a reliable source at the company they won't run the story I guess?
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• tedunangst 12y ago
  What percentage of the medias audience cares about GitHub?
• smackfu 12y ago
  Because no one cares about GitHub. If it was Facebook...
  • coldcode 12y ago
    I wonder if you created a page on FB for GreatFire and promoted it what would FB do? I imagine they are too big to be successfully DDOS'd but I would think they could kiss China goodbye forever. So I imagine they would simply ban it.
    • burger_moon 12y ago
      After a quick google search, it looks like last year they were brought down temporarily from what might have been a ddos. http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/21/heres-video-of-the-cyber-attack-that-may-have-spurred-this-weeks-facebook-outage/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/21/heres-video-of-the-cyber-at...
      • pyre 12y ago
        I've heard that the outage was a screw-up by a junior programmer that was accidentally given too much access to the system by his/her supervisor. Apparently a bad configuration was applied to their servers. This seems to match up with the official Facebook announcement linked in that article.
  • grandalf 12y ago
    how hard would it be for someone to do this attack to facebook? I'm guessing Facebook has already faced this kind of attack and designed its systems to be resilient to it.
• zerocored 12y ago
  DDoS attacks and similar things are of very little significance to people who don't understand what they are. In their minds, all the damage is on virtual space and nothing is real. And they're somehow sure that all the damage done will be fixed soon.
  • UnoriginalGuy 12y ago
    Additionally a lot of non-tech people don't understand the cost implications of a DDoS. If companies really want the media to get on board then create a figure for how many $/hour you're losing. Heck make a widget which counts upwards (e.g. we've lost $25,000 due to this DDoS since the start). The downside is it might just encourage the DDoS-ers, the upside is the media might take it seriously.
    • oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
      I'm not sure anyone understands the cost implications of a DDoS, particularly one on a third-party service. Even if you absolutely need to make a change to something that has to be done by more than one collaborator and has to be deployed via github and it has to be patched right now and there's really no other way, how do you go about estimating the losses anyway? You can't just assume that whatever average income you would have collected over the last 72 hours has been lost forever. Is anyone out there even attempting to estimate how much revenue they've lost as a result of this DDoS?
      • nateguchi 12y ago
        I'm sure a lot of companies have backup plans in place, for instance, Bitbucket repo clones or an internal copy
• th0br0 12y ago
  Wouldn't such news coverage only worsen the problem? After all, the attackers would receive a kind of confirmation of their goals.
  • zerocored 12y ago
    The same can be said for a wide range of criminal activities covered by the news.
  • yc1010 12y ago
    In this case the attack is motivated by desire to suppress knowledge of a project hosted on Github, publicity is what they fear most... Now to get back to the OPs question: 1. Mainstream media might have too much to lose if they criticize China, just like in many countries where property bubbles burst the mainstream media suppressed any mention of bubble forming since they were making out like bandits from advertising property, could be something similar happening here. 2. The story is a non-story outside nerd circles, now if Facebook or Twitter was being DDOSed your sure would hear about it since journalists do care about these sites.
  • LamaOfRuin 12y ago
    Only if github actually stopped hosting the attacked repositories. Otherwise it would be more of a Streisand effect, raising awareness of the workings of the great firewall and that there are effective tools that circumvent the filtering. The wider the attack is covered in the news the harder it is for censors to stop the flow of that particular information.
• davewiner 12y ago
  The tech press should be covering it. As should the net-based political press. Never mind what "most people" care about -- this is news.
  • antonioevans 12y ago
    The "tech" press is pretty much buzzfeed-ish these days.
    • Squarel 12y ago
      Some of the tech press is covering it. Gizmodo, slashdot, the register. WashPo also had a blog, as did a few other non-tech sites. The reason they don't show as Github specifically is because it is reported as "Anti-censorship group is under DDOS"
• gus_massa 12y ago
  Perhaps because non-programmers (aka civilians) don't know what GitHub is, and it's difficult to explain. Perhaps it's interesting to reframe in a language that affect most people: "Linux development halted by ciberattack!!!" That's not completely true and too linkbaity, especially with the three bang sings. Is there another huge mainstream project hosted there? Another linkbait: "Hackers break hackers site!!!" Not so appealing to most people, but you can exploit curiosity. Also, you'll get a lot of complains about the incorrect use of the word "hackers" in both positions.
  • pyre 12y ago
    How about: "China Attacks US Rails System!!!" Github still runs on Ruby on Rails, right?
  • hk__2 12y ago
    Linux has a mirror on GitHub but they don’t use it for development.
  • ikeboy 12y ago
    Billion dollar US company under attack by Chinese!
  • mcintyre1994 12y ago
    You could namedrop Facebook, Google and Microsoft without too much exaggeration.
  • LamaOfRuin 12y ago
    "Critical US Cyber-infrastructure under attack"
  • chebureki 12y ago
    While it may be difficult to explain to civilians what Github is, the issues of any government overreach into the Internet domain are easy to understand. For instance, a state does not like particular content on the Internet. It wants to force a company to get rid of it by attempting to hamper the company's service. Google's clash in China over censorship has been wildly covered by the media.
• maebert 12y ago
  Here's how to make this news interesting to the mainstream: "Chinese hackers cost US economy $100,000 / h" Well, replace random accusations and numbers by facts of course, but that's a valid question: How many employees can currently not to any meaningful work because they don't have access to what they're supposed to work on? This times salaries spent on them anyway is a good lower bound for the damage done to the economy (actual damage should be higher since employees should of course add more value to the economy than their salary).
  • Swizec 12y ago
    I do all my work via Github and honestly haven't noticed a single burp in the service. Is anyone other than Github employees who have to deal with this even affected?
    • jayrhynas 12y ago
      I've had troubles with the web interface and with pushing/pulling on and off since Friday
      • nindalf 12y ago
        I pushed around 5-6 times and it failed only once.
    • elvispt 12y ago
      I had issues pushing with an application key that was not being recognized. Now I don't know if this was directly related, but the timing raises an eyebrow.
    • qguv 12y ago
      Github pages is pretty sluggish right now. Github's actual Web interface is much slower than, say, pushing and pulling.
    • nazgob 12y ago
      I could not work for a few hours yesterday. push/pull/rebase was not working for me.
• justinsb 12y ago
  Do we have any indication how big the attack is? If the attack volume isn't very big, this isn't news.
• newshound00908 12y ago
  What is the attack? Who is effected? How much is the impact? When did it start? Why is it being done? Answer those questions, create a blog post, and send a link to that post to your local news, the national news and any outlet focused on nationalism since it is China - think right wing political sites. Make the job easy and this will get more coverage.
  • bostonpete 12y ago
    So if I want a news outlet to pay more attention to a particular issue, the solution is to do the reporting myself and serve it up to them on a silver platter? Maybe that's true, but it hardly seems practical in general, nor does it answer the OP's question...
    • gus_massa 12y ago
      Essentially yes. If it's about your own business it's called PR: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
    • hnnewguy 12y ago
      >So if I want a news outlet to pay more attention to a particular issue the solution is to do the reporting myself Yes. Why not? People complain about it not being in the "mainstream" news, but then say, "well, that's someone else's problem to deal with".
  • hga 12y ago
    The very basics I learned in ... grade school, in flyover county in the early '70s. As Wikipedia renders it, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws Although I'll note that it's just now getting to be a big enough story for this, i.e. how long it's gone on and how clear it's become that it is a state action.
• websitescenes 12y ago
  DDoS attacks are very common. Every large web based company will deal with an attack on this vector sooner or later and more than once. I think itwould be an issue if we started considering every single instance as a foreign attack. It seems to me like you trying to make a parallel to the Sony hacking. These two instances are very different. The Sony hackers used a much more diverse toolset to inflict damage on a number of different vectors.
  • blamarvt 12y ago
    All I'm trying to say is that this DDoS is pretty obviously being perpetrated by the PRC. Regardless of the attack vector, isn't this an important global political issue? Most attacks are carried out by fringe groups, and while I'm sure governments carry out attacks like this all the time... normally they aren't so obvious.
    • websitescenes 12y ago
      I think it would be relatively easy to obfuscate the origin of a DDoS attack. Consider how easy it is to even spoof IP and MAC addresses. Now consider that a typical attack of this scale is most likely utilizing a botnet. It's pretty clear that much of the 'evidence' used in placing blame for attacks is just unreliable.
• atmosx 12y ago
  Because it's totally irrelevant to someone who is not directly related, not to just programming but Github. I'd like to ask back some questions: 1) What makes you think it's a worthy topic? 2) What makes you think China or any powerful group - not sure in what terms this group is supposed to be powerful - has anything to do with it?
• hutt 12y ago
  There's a Lack of relevance outside our filterbubble.
• hnnewguy 12y ago
  >Why is this not in the mainstream news? HackerNews, Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook aren't mainstream? I beg to differ. If this event was reported on any other media, I'd have no idea that it was occurring.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• josephmx 12y ago
  It's a developer oriented site. Why would a non-developer care that it's down? The main outlets want the attention of the majority - so we don't get alerts when HN, Github, etc go down or get attacked but we do when Facebook drops for 15 minutes
  • blamarvt 12y ago
    If there was an attack on the distribution network of American manufacturer would it matter what they produce? The precedent set by doing nothing politically here is pretty scary to me! (Of course, political conversations could be going on but not publicized.)
    • josephmx 12y ago
      That's a very different scenario than what's actually happening, and it's very interesting that you jump to "American company, defend it!" instead of pointing out that it's a valuable tool worldwide.
• rdl 12y ago
  I've had a fair number of press people contact me about this. I think the issue is: github isn't a consumer service, and the attack is novel enough, that explaining it requires explaining several things at the same time. Adding In the gfw/China aspect makes it even more confusing. This is the kind of story where a tech individual should probably do a compressive blog post which gets syndicated, rather than relying on journalists. I can understand why no one at Baidu, GitHub, or Fastly is doing this, though.
  • joelx 12y ago
    How many of us run websites that we can publidh this story ourselves on? http://www.blog.joelx.com/ddos-attack-on-github-could-be-act-of-war/10328/ http://www.blog.joelx.com/ddos-attack-on-github-could-be-act...
  • brudgers 12y ago
    The mainstream press also has an interest in operating on the ground in China. Promoting the attack on Github as newsworthy has some potential for making that work on the ground more difficult or impossible. It's as simple as a business decision that reflects the greater profit tweets about presidential contenders as the subject of journalism.
• larrys 12y ago
  "Why is this not in the mainstream news? " Ironically, you realize of course that if something is mainstream news (or any news at all) then that's a trophy that creates a greater likelihood of future copycat events happening. Notoriety is certainly part of the buzz of doing something like this.
• haosdent 12y ago
  How about this title: China suck the Internet since March 27th !!!
• nonissue420 12y ago
  The mainstream media no longer exists. It's all a level playing field on the Internet. The bigger question is where do you get your news? If it's here, guess what, it's the #1 story. If you follow entertainment news sources, like CBS, NBC, etc, what do you expect? They are more interested in production of entertainment.
• sammermpc 12y ago
  I'm sure it will be. Give them a minute. After all, I bet there are plenty of media folks reading this thread. And plenty of media orgs use GitHub themselves.
• cubano 12y ago
  Because, simply, the ability for the Technorati to push and pull code from a website does not an act-of-war make, no matter how you and I may view it. It seems almost certain, however, that in the coming week, this story will be told in the "mainstream news" (I don't really know what that is anymore tho, TBH) I am sure, when things shake out, the attacks will be used in some political-posturing kind of way and by some politician who will judiciously use it to drum up support among an interested group.
• chebureki 12y ago
  http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-coding-website-github-hit-with-cyberattack-1427638940 http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-coding-website-github-hit-wi...
• zkhalique 12y ago
  What github attack?
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• Iftheshoefits 12y ago
  One plausible reason: the story is a "slow burn" story that hasn't had time to gain traction. Mainstream news acts more like an aggregator of information that percolates out of various niche segments' echo chambers: give it time. Another thing to consider: what is particularly newsworthy about it to the general public? Software technology focused people would find this very news worthy. I have little sympathy for a business of any size that uses github as its primary repository: the most-current source should be maintained on an internal server, in my opinion, and companies that require github to be fully available to operate are doing it wrong. I mean one of the primary advantages of a distributed repo is that there is a complete history for every node that has synced with the most recent commit. There shouldn't be a strong dependence on a central repo.
  • pyre 12y ago
    > There shouldn't be a strong dependence on a central repo. Most groups are not setup like the Linux kernel where there is a "gatekeeper" who is a person that directly pulls from other people's repos (or from commits sent to an email list). A central repository becomes "the truth" and once something is "the truth" it becomes the person that wants to push their code to this repo to do the merging. There is nothing about this that is inherent to Github in particular, but telling everyone to change their "origin" remote to point somewhere else can be an issue depending on how large your group is. And what if someone manages to get a push to (e.g.) master through the Github DDoS before everyone is on the new remote repo? Now Github and BackupRemote have branched, when you really want BackupRemote to be a superset of the copy on Github.
• fma 12y ago
  Just have Buzzfeed cover it: Top 10 ways to DDOS a code repository. Number 7 will surprise you. Millions of people are now accessing github. Who they are will surprise you! You've been DDOS wrong your whole life. Find out how to do it correctly. Millions of people now unknowingly going to github. Find out who, and why you might be too. Also don't forget WhiteHouse has a github account...."WhiteHouse code repository under attack by China"
  • bzp1995 12y ago
    The attack is an act supported by Chinese Government. it is an battle between a autarchic country and an company. China is good at it, a few days ago, Google issues Warning on Rogue Chinese Digital TLS Certs. The best response to the attack is to sell and not buy stocks of Chinese IT companies and not using any of their products. Here are some companies who work for GFW: venustech(启明星辰) Qihoo（NYSE: QIHU） 360.cn(360安全卫士) They don't care about how you feel but They DO and ONLY care about their money. China is military dictatorship. It is actually a Developed ISIS country. Here are some pics to help you understand why China attack github, because China don't want people to know what really happened and happening in China https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CAe6HhaXIAAfyll.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CAe6HhaXIAAfyll.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B_phuEKU0AAoa0r.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B_phuEKU0AAoa0r.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B3clncbCAAALgED.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B3clncbCAAALgED.jpg
  • fma 12y ago
    As a follow up, WSJ is covering it. http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-coding-website-github-hit-with-cyberattack-1427638940 http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-coding-website-github-hit-wi... They beat BuzzFeed to it!
• MarcScott 12y ago
  Mainstream media only ever report a few categories of story regarding the tech industry. - Hackers stealing information - Billion dollar acquisitions - Harassment scandals - Apple announces anything
• army 12y ago
  http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-coding-website-github-hit-with-cyberattack-1427638940 http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-coding-website-github-hit-wi...
  • ryan-c 12y ago
    Google search for the article - click the first link to get past the paywall. https://www.google.com/search?q=U.S.+Coding+Website+GitHub+Hit+With+Cyberattack&oq=x https://www.google.com/search?q=U.S.+Coding+Website+GitHub+H...
• brudgers 12y ago
  To a first approximation, nobody cares. Inside particular segments of the tech community, lots of people care. But the tech community is very small on an absolute scale and its segments even smaller. The other group of people who care are those engaged in ongoing cyber warfare. To them Github is probably not worth defending at the risk of escalating to a wider cyber and economic conflict. Even should US government cyber warefare assets attribute the attack directly to an entity with a direct relationship to 中华人民共和国 diplomatic corps, why would the US deploy assets to protect a company that is knowingly violating 中华人民共和国 policy? Github is neither required nor prohibited from hosting projects that violate 中华人民共和国 foreign or domestic policy. It has made a business decision for business reasons. Don't get me wrong, I am not defending 中华人民共和国 policies in regard to the dissemination of information and propaganda [or the US policies regarding the same]. Nor am I criticizing or praising Github's business decisions. I am just explaining what I believe is the case, not what I think should or should not be the case.
  • fragsworth 12y ago
    The U.S. is obligated to protect and defend individuals and corporations that don't violate U.S. policy. Not some foreign policy. If the U.S. government is not going to protect us from this shit, then what is the purpose of our military?
• durabell 12y ago
  http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1301111-anti-censorship-github-pages-under-ddos-attack-from-china/ http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1301111-anti-censorship-gith... http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/27/8299555/github-china-ddos-censorship-great-firewall http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/27/8299555/github-china-ddos-... http://motherboard.vice.com/read/did-china-just-launch-a-cyber-attack-on-github http://motherboard.vice.com/read/did-china-just-launch-a-cyb... It's getting wall to wall online coverage mate.
• rurban 12y ago
  WSJ picked it up
• davidbranniganz 12y ago
  this article on paid russian trolls makes me wonder if the chinese are employing the same tactic on this forum http://www.rferl.org/content/how-to-guide-russian-trolling-trolls/26919999.html http://www.rferl.org/content/how-to-guide-russian-trolling-t...
• martiuk 12y ago
  Who gives a crap about some dumb website for nerds. /s
• NelsonMinar 12y ago
  It took another day, but this attack has now hit the mainstream press. Some examples: http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-coding-website-github-hit-with-cyberattack-1427638940 http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-coding-website-github-hit-wi... http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/github-coding-site-hit-by-cyberattack-1.3014644 http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/github-coding-site-hit-by-... http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/740f727c-d699-11e4-97c3-00144feab7de.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/740f727c-d699-11e4-97c3-00144feab7... http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/30/github-cleans-up-cyber-attack http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/30/github-cle... http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/china-accused-of-launching-fourday-cyber-attack-on-us-coding-website-github-10143392.html http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...
• slowpoison 12y ago
  It is, now. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/technology/china-appears-to-attack-github-by-diverting-web-traffic.html?ref=technology http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/technology/china-appears-t...