In early June, Microsoft’s main office suite — which includes the Outlook and OneDrive apps — experienced sporadic but severe outages, as did its cloud computing platform. A mysterious hacktivist group claimed responsibility for it, claiming to have flooded the sites with spam traffic during widespread denial-of-service (or DDos) attacks.
Although initially reluctant to mention the cause, Microsoft eventually revealed that the group was to blame for the attacks.
But the company has provided few details and has not specified how many customers were affected or whether the impact was global. A spokeswoman confirmed that the group calling itself Anonymous Sudan was responsible for the attacks. She claimed responsibility on her Telegram channel. Some security researchers believe the group is Russian.
Microsoft posted its explanation in a blog post Friday night. The Associated Press had made a request for comment two days earlier. With scant details, Microsoft said the attacks “temporarily affected the availability” of some services. He added that the hackers focused on “disruption and publicity,” possibly using leased cloud infrastructure and virtual private networks to intensively attack Microsoft servers from so-called zombie computer botnets around the world.
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Microsoft said there was no evidence of access to any customer information, or that such information had been compromised.
Although DDoS attacks are primarily a nuisance — because they prevent access to websites without penetrating them — security experts say they can disrupt the work of millions of people if they succeed in disrupting the services of a giant like Microsoft on which a considerable amount depends. part of world trade.
It is unknown if this was the case.
“We really have no way of measuring the impact if Microsoft doesn’t provide that information,” said Jake Williams, a prominent cybersecurity researcher and former offensive hacker for the US National Security Agency.