Tens of thousands of Microsoft users reported severe service disruptions to flagship products in the company’s work suite in early June, preventing them from accessing essential remote work equipment such as Outlook email and One-Drive file-sharing apps.
The cause of the sporadic service outages, which Reuters said lasted more than two hours, was unclear at first, according to the company’s tweets at the time. But now, the software company knows the cause of the outages: a distributed denial of (DDoS) executed through “Anonymous Sudan,” a cybercriminal organization with alleged ties to Russia.
Microsoft attributed the outages the week of the fifth of June to the cybercriminal organization on its online page on Friday. Without details, the message said the attacks “temporarily affected the availability” of some services. The company also said the attackers targeted “disruption and publicity” and most likely used rented cloud infrastructure and virtual personal networks to bombard Microsoft’s servers from so-called zombie computer botnets around the world.
Microsoft’s post connected the attackers to an organization known as “Storm-1359,” employing a term it attributes to computers whose association it has not yet established. However, a Microsoft representative told The Associated Press that the organization called Anonymous Sudan was responsible for the attacks.
Microsoft said there is no evidence that visitor data has been accessed or compromised. The company did not immediately respond to CBS MoneyWatch’s request for comment.
While DDoS attacks are primarily a nuisance, making them inaccessible without penetrating them, security experts say they can disrupt the work of millions of other people if they manage to disrupt popular tech services.
“DDoS is vital in terms of client usage, [which means] a website can’t be accessed, but it’s not a complicated attack,” Gil Messing, leader of software and security company Check Point, told CBS MoneyWatch.
Since the attack, Microsoft has taken several steps to protect against DDoS attacks in the long term, adding to “optimize” its Internet Azure application firewall, which serves as a line of defense against potential attacks, the company said in its statement.
Microsoft will want such precautions to protect itself from long-term attackers, who may be emboldened by the good fortune of the Anonymous Sudan attack, Steven Adair, president of cybersecurity company Volexity, told CBS MoneyWatch.
“It turns out that the efforts of DDoS [Anonymous Sudan] have had a bit of good fortune and that has attracted a bit of attention,” Adair said. “This may lead to imitation attempts, but we hope not. “. “
The Associated Press contributed to the report.
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