Microsoft outages in early June due to cyberattacks

Microsoft confirmed that the disruptions experienced by certain services earlier this month were caused by cyberattacks. However, the company stated that it found no indication of any customer data being accessed or compromised. The company said that it detected increased traffic surges against specific services, resulting in temporary availability issues starting in early June 2023.

“Beginning in early June 2023, Microsoft identified surges in traffic against some services that temporarily impacted availability,” according to a blog post by Microsoft.

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Upon recognising the threat, Microsoft initiated an investigation and began monitoring the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) activity carried out by a threat actor referred to as Storm-1359.

Responsibility for the attack

As of now, Microsoft has not provided any information regarding the identification of the responsible party for the attack. Reuters attempted to seek clarification from Microsoft but did not receive an immediate response.

Understanding DDoS attacks

DDoS attacks operate by directing large volumes of internet traffic towards targeted servers. The intention behind these attacks is to overwhelm the servers and render them offline.

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While DDoS attacks are relatively unsophisticated in nature, they can still cause significant disruptions.

Impact on Microsoft's 365 software suite

On June 5, Microsoft's 365 software suite, which includes applications like Teams and Outlook, experienced a downtime of over two hours for thousands of users.

A minor recurrence of the disruption was observed the following morning. This incident marked the fourth outage faced by Microsoft within a year.

A group known as Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility for the cyberattacks on Microsoft's servers, as stated on their Telegram social media channel, reported AP news agency. While some security researchers suspect the group to have Russian origins, no definitive detail is available.

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According to Microsoft, the cyberattack was made for causing disruption and gaining publicity and likely employed rented cloud infrastructure and virtual private networks (VPNs) to launch the attacks with the use of botnets of zombie computers around the world.

Jake Williams, a prominent cybersecurity researcher and former National Security Agency offensive hacker, said, “We really have no way to measure the impact if Microsoft doesn’t provide that info,” reported AP news agency.

“We know some resources were inaccessible for some, but not others. This often happens with DDoS of globally distributed systems,” Williams added.

Williams also noted that Microsoft's reluctance to provide a precise measure of customer impact suggests the magnitude of the attacks might be substantial.

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