Hacker News Reader

Comment by myth_buster | Hacker News Reader

Just to clarify, did the DDOS stop due to GitHub adding that warning text making the hack reflect poorly on Baidu and hence the perpetrators being subjected to internal pressure? If not, GitHub would still have to serve that JS and hence would still be bombarded by millions of content request.

View on HN

Even better, popping up a JS alert stops further JS execution, so this was a clever way for Github to throttle connections (rather than them being made every 2 seconds as per the hijacked Baidu JS)

they can do something better: they can put some javascript disabling the hijacked JS like

alert('......'); r_send = function(){}

window.top.location = "http://gov.cn";

I see; I missed the part where the resource request was executed every 2 seconds. The alert essentially would make the page unusable. From my understanding that Baidu is Google for china, the amount of productivity lost since people not being able to search, would mean the hack backfired spectacularly.

Well, except for the fact that it only impacts people who access Baidu from outside the Chinese firewall. People who access Baidu from inside China would not have their Baidu use interrupted.

It looks like what they did was change the url to only serve out the alert in plain text. Which is a lot less resources to use. I would also assume that they are willing to use those resources to fight back.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com