Microsoft Outages Caused by Cyberattacks and DDoS Attacks

Microsoft has identified a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack executed by "Anonymous Sudan," a cybercriminal group with alleged Russian ties, as the cause of the sporadic service disruptions affecting tens of thousands of users of its flagship office suite products in early June. 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. Microsoft said there was no evidence any customer data was accessed or compromised. The company has taken several steps to guard against future DDoS attacks.