GitHub attack marks escalation in China's cyber censorship battle, experts warn

File photo.(REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon)

The ongoing denial-of-service attack against code-sharing site GitHub marks an escalation in Chinas cyber censorship battle, security experts warn, urging a strong response from the U.S. government.

San Francisco-based GitHub has not said who it believes is behind the attack, which started last month, although the finger of suspicion has been pointed firmly in the direction of China. Anti-online censorship group Greatfire.org says that Chinese authorities took over computers both inside and outside the country to launch cyberattacks against the Greatfire.org website and GitHub, which hosts some of the group's data.

The attack, which was the largest in GitHubs history, began March 26, causing intermittent shutdowns of the code sharing forum. The shadowy attackers used the web browsers of unsuspecting, uninvolved people" to flood github.com with high levels of traffic, according to GitHub. On March 31, after days of battling the attack, GitHub reported that that its service was operating normally.

I believe that its likely that it is the government of China behind this, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at software security specialist F-Secure told FoxNews.com. The reason why the attack is still ongoing is because their target is to cause pain for GitHub.

Its a tremendous escalation of nation state enforcement of their policy of banning what people can get access to, added Richard Stiennon, chief research analyst at IT-Harvest. China probably thinks of the U.S.s Internet infrastructure as the wild wild west, where everybody does what they want this could be bad, if the government doesnt respond, there will be more attacks.

Security expert Robert Graham traced a machine used in the GitHub attack to a location on or near the so-called Great Firewall of China -- the technology infrastructure for Internet censorship in China. This is important evidence for our government, he wrote, in a blog post. It'll be interesting to see how they respond to these attacks - attacks by a nation state against key United States Internet infrastructure.

The long-running nature of the digital assault also underlines the threat posed by shadowy attackers. A person with knowledge of the issue told FoxNews.com Monday that the attack is ongoing, but has decreased in intensity. GitHub, the person added, is mitigating the attack well and is fully operational.

F-Secures Hypponen told FoxNews.com that GitHub poses a unique challenge for China. With every single GitHub page encrypted, The Great Firewall of China is unable to block individual pages on the site. They would have to block everything, and that will not happen because a lot of Chinese companies are using GitHub, he said. The only option that China has is to bully GitHub.

Greatfire.org said it had mirrored some of its content on GitHub repositories, and that the data were the targets of the attacks.

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GitHub attack marks escalation in China's cyber censorship battle, experts warn