My guess would be a hack of some kind (eg compromising a popular project's code or downloads) and then using the DDOS as a smokescreen. This is something bad guys are increasingly doing with banking hacks - steal the money and then divert everyone's attention with a DDOS. That makes it a lot harder for the victims to find out what happened and distracts the financial institution.
Interestingly, I had a kind of DOS attack on my email account when someone gained access to a credit card account of mine and used it to send money to themselves - I got inundated with hundreds of random emails per second when they were sending money to themselves, so as to make it hard for me to get the notifications and do something about it.
Fortunately, the pattern of emails wasn't very sophisticated and I had made a rule to filter them out within a few minutes and had the account closed within 5 minutes, but I can see how this would be a pretty effective tactic against less computer literate targets.
Um, no. The reason they DDoS financial institutions is so they have a chance to cash out the stolen goods immediately. Stolen financial data has an expiration date and the DDoS extends that just long enough for it to be useful.
DDoS'ing github because you trojaned a source tree calls attention to the fact that you did it. Only the dumbest of all hackers would do such a thing and that is almost certainly NOT what is happening here. When you trojan a source tree, it only becomes useful after your intended victim downloads and installs it, which can take months or even years.
If you DDOS GitHub as a whole, how does that call attention to the one project a bad guy has trojaned?
If the project has mostly "commercial" developers then chances are they work on it during the week. DDOS GitHub during the week and let off for the weekend. That gives a few days worth for your trojan to be downloaded by the unsuspecting. People will also have tired hearing about the "github news" so new news about trojaning will take a little longer to disperse.
Here are some random ones off the top of my head. I'm happy to accept that you can't think of any value of these to bad guys, but the bad guys are not limited by your or my imagination.
That is fascinating - I have been meaning to revise my security processes and a livecd for banking is a very good idea.
So most dos attacks are
1. Put key logger on company x machines
2. Gather banking keys
3. Transfer money
4. Hit with dos and get key logger to do as much damage as poss
Only two weaknesses leap out:
1. Two factor authentication - I genuinely do not know at what level a bank stops requiring a separate token for each transaction but it seems silly to ever do that.
2. The money mule - I recently was amazed that directors in Hollywood sometimes accept a percentage of net. But allowing your bank account to be used by some guys on the Internet?
Really those two issues seem ... Well with those blockers I would not invest in the internet crime startup. Weird they have bootstrapped quite well
More info: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/11/ddos-attacks-spell-gameov...