Turkish Hackers Knock GitHub Offline with DDoS Attack

The largest code repository on the net today, GitHub, faced several hours of downtime earlier today while a group of Turkish hackers claimed to have launched a Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack against the company, knocking the service offline.

A team of Turkish-based hackers calling themselves Team Herakles claimed to be responsible for the 50 minutes of downtime GitHub suffered earlier today.

Stress tests are not Attacks ?? #GİTHUB #GİTHUBDOWN #ATTACK #SERVER #DOWN

— Herakles (@THTHerakles) May 6, 2015

Team Herakles claimed they took GitHub offline earlier today for fun, and that there was no motive behind the attack. Team Herakles is the same team of Turkish hackers who knocked the Vatican city website offline in early April 2015, in regard to a comment Pope Francis’s had made related to Turkey and Armenians.

GitHub is no stranger to cyberattacks, and specifically DDoS attacks. Back in March 2015 the service became the target of an ongoing attack from the Chinese government aiming to shutdown the service helping people circumvents China’s great firewall, or censorship wall. GitHub was taken offline by China’s great cannon hacking tool, a tool aimed at sending massive DDoS attacks with faulty traffic. GitHub experienced long periods of service outages for over a week during the attacks.

Though GitHub was found offline earlier today, GitHub’s official maintenance crew wrote on Twitter the site was experiencing issues and undergoing maintenance, while not entertaining the notion of a possible attack.

“We’re seeing high error rates on http://t.co/2qUwMFsmyu and are investigating”.

— GitHub Status (@githubstatus) May 6, 2015

Following the brief fifty minutes of downtime, the GitHub status team noted the site was once again fully functional and error’s should no longer occur.