It’s not controversial to call this an unsolved problem.” airport sites were hit.Įdward Amoroso, NYU professor and CEO of TAG Cyber, said the Microsoft incident highlights how DDoS attacks remain “a significant risk that we all just agree to avoid talking about. Pro-Russian hacking groups including Killnet - which the cybersecurity firm Mandiant says is Kremlin-affiliated - have been bombarding government and other websites of Ukraine's allies with DDoS attacks. Cybersecurity sleuthing tends to take time - and even then can be a challenge if the adversary is skilled. He said Microsoft's apparent unwillingness to provide an objective measure of customer impact “probably speaks to the magnitude.”Īs for Storm-1359's identity, Williams said he doesn't think Microsoft knows yet. This often happens with DDoS of globally distributed systems,” Williams added. “We know some resources were inaccessible for some, but not others. Williams said he was not aware of Outlook previously being attacked at this scale. “We really have no way to measure the impact if Microsoft doesn’t provide that info,” said Jake Williams, a prominent cybersecurity researcher and a former National Security Agency offensive hacker. It said the attackers were focused on “disruption and publicity” and likely used rented cloud infrastructure and virtual private networks to bombard Microsoft servers from so-called botnets of zombie computers around the globe.įederal judge throws out lawsuit filed by chess star over cheating allegations

Slim on details, the post said the attacks “temporarily impacted availability” of some services. Microsoft’s explanation in a blog post Friday evening followed a request by The Associated Press two days earlier. Some security researchers believe the group to be Russian. A group that calls itself Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility on its Telegram social media channel at the time.

It would not say how many customers were affected or describe the attackers, who it has named Storm-1359. Initially reticent to name the cause, Microsoft has now disclosed that DDoS attacks by a murky upstart were indeed to blame.īut the software giant has offered few details - and would not comment on the attacks' magnitude. A shadowy hacktivist group claimed responsibility, saying it flooded the sites with junk traffic in distributed denial-of-service attacks. In early June, sporadic but serious service disruptions plagued Microsoft's flagship office suite - including the Outlook email and OneDrive file-sharing apps - and cloud computing platform.

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