Mystery Attack on SourceHut, a Leading Free/Libre Alternative to GitHub and Gitlab
Months ago: (they must be losing their panties)
THIS post is partly speculative. The conclusions, if any, are left to the readers' collective intuition.
Almost a week ago we wondered aloud in IRC; who would attack SourceHut and why? What for? We could not point the finger at anybody, as there was a lack of hard evidence. The same goes for Codeberg (overlapping code/projects).
So let's consider some context.
Microsoft's GitHub - and also Gitlab - have financial issues. Their bloatware, which sometimes they offer free of charge (not free as in freedom), requires people with high salaries to build and maintain. They also need lawyers. So we're looking at millions of dollars a year just for bare basics. It moreover requires people to babysit 24/7 and there are electricity (or hosting) bills. This does not scale well and does not look pretty. Business models are elusive here.
Who stands to benefit from the "unprecedented 170 hour outage" of SourceHut? Here is what they've just said (more links here - may be updated over time) in their official site: "We never received any kind of ransom note or other communication from the attacker. We do not know who was behind the attack, nor their motivations, and likely never will. We know that they targeted SourceHut specifically, and that they followed us as we worked on mitigations, directing their attack at new infrastructure as it was being set up."
There's a graph too:
Who stands to benefit (cui bono)? That might say something about the motivations. DDoS attacks that are potent and persistent are not cheap to launch. If there's no direct financial benefit, then what is it? Who is it?
This brings back old memories (15 years ago). This put our site offline for several days back then. We never discovered who did this. After these DDoS attacks we needed to find another host - and perhaps that too was part of the attacker's plan. █
