Microsoft admitted that it was the target of a cyberattack carried out by a group linked to Russia called “Anonymous Sudan”.
Microsoft's service disruptions earlier this month were indeed the result of breaches - the software giant has admitted it.
In a post on Friday (June 16), the tech giant attributed the "increase in traffic to some services that temporarily impacted availability" to "ongoing DDoS from the threat actor that Microsoft is tracking as Storm-1359."
Microsoft has named an unnamed group as the attackers; however, a hacktivist group called Anonymous Sudan has claimed responsibility for the Telegram.
DDoS refers to a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, in which hackers bombard a server with unwanted web traffic to block user access. Messaging platform Telegram, code management site GitHub , and network provider Dyn have all faced similar attacks in the past decade.
In the case of Microsoft, the attackers focused on “disruption and publicity” and used leased cloud infrastructure and virtual private networks to overwhelm Microsoft servers with so-called botnets of zombie computers around the world.
The company said it has seen "no evidence that customer data has been compromised.".
A brief timeline of Microsoft's breaches
On June 5, thousands of users complained that Microsoft Outlook was not working. Microsoft 365 acknowledged the outage and said it was investigating the issue on Twitter. The company said that Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business. A few hours later, everything was restored, but more attacks throughout the week.
On June 6, an anonymous individual from Sudan claimed to have breached Microsoft's systems and stolen tens of millions of customer data.
On June 8, computer security news site BleepingComputer.com reported that cloud-based file-hosting service OneDrive was down worldwide for a period of time.
Microsoft confirmed on June 9 that its Azure cloud computing platform had been affected.
Hackers disrupt Microsoft services due to US involvement in Sudan
"We can target any American company we want. Americans, don't blame us, blame government for thinking of interfering in Sudan." — Anonymous Sudan on Telegram channel
Information source: qz.com
