GitHub was back to its normal operations on Wednesday after suffering from a week-long cyberattack allegedly carried out by the Chinese government. The site has been down since March 27.
The code-sharing site delivered the good news for programmers, who frequent the site, through its Twitter account. The recent attack is considered by programmers to be the "largest distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attack from the site's history with the hackers using new sophisticated techniques." The site is known to be the largest code hoster in the world with nine million users and more than 21.1 million repositories.
Security experts told the Wall Street Journal that there is evidence that the hackers might be from China as it is targeting the two pages of GitHub that links copies to some websites that are banned in the country. The latest attack shows that the Chinese government is progressively targeting sites abroad, using the sites' own systems, to ensure that they have full control of the content accessible to its people.
It is still unclear why the attacks stopped, but analysts are worried that the Chinese government is actively finding ways to suppress free speech online. The Great Firewall does not only block traffic outside its borders, but it also seems to fire back by taking down websites that post malicious content related to the China, according to the New York Times.
Aside from GitHub, the anti-censorship activist group Greatfire.org. also claimed that it had the same issue and it strongly believes that the Chinese government was behind these cyber attacks.
"The Great Firewall has switched from being a passive, inbound filter to being an active and aggressive outbound one," the Greatfire.org wrote in an online post.
The Cyberspace Administration of China didn't respond to requests for comment.
