Tens of thousands of Microsoft users reported serious service disruptions affecting the company’s flagship office suite products in early June, leaving them unable to access essential remote work tools such as Outlook email and One-Drive file-sharing applications.
Intermittent service outage caused by Reuters mentioned It lasted more than two hours, and wasn’t clear at first, according to the company Tweets on time. But now, the software company has identified the cause of the outage: a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack carried out by “Anonymous Sudan,” a cybercriminal group with alleged Russian connections.
Microsoft attributed the outage during the week of June 5 to a group of cybercriminals in A statement on its website on Friday. Elaborating on the details, the post said the attacks had “temporarily affected the availability” of some services. The company also said the attackers focused on “disruption and propaganda” and likely used rented cloud infrastructure and virtual private networks to bombard Microsoft’s servers from so-called botnets of zombie computers around the world.
The Microsoft post linked the attackers to a group known as “Storm-1359” using a condition Assigned to groups whose affiliation has not yet been proven. However, a Microsoft representative told the Associated Press that the group dubbed Anonymous Sudan was behind the attacks.
Microsoft said there was no evidence that any customer data had been accessed or compromised. The company did not immediately respond to CBS MoneyWatch’s request for comment.
Uncomplicated
While DDoS attacks are essentially annoying, making websites inaccessible without hacking them, security experts say they can disrupt the work of millions of people if they succeed in boycotting popular tech services.
“DDoS is important in terms of consumer use, [meaning] You can’t break into a website, but it’s not a sophisticated attack,” Jill Messing, chief of staff at software and security firm Check Point, told CBS MoneyWatch.
In its statement, the company said that since the attack, Microsoft has taken several steps to protect against future DDoS attacks, including “tuning” the Azure Web Application Firewall, which acts as a line of defense against potential attacks.
Stephen Adair, president of cybersecurity firm Volexity, told CBS MoneyWatch that Microsoft will need such precautions to fend off future attackers, who might be emboldened by the success of the Anonymous Sudan attack.
“It seems [Anonymous Sudan’s] “DDoS efforts have met with a small level of success and that’s gained quite a bit of attention. It can lead to copycat attempts, but we’re hoping that’s not the case,” Adair said.
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
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