Earlier this month, thousands of users experienced an outage with Microsoft 365 suite, which includes Outlook, Word, and Excel, according to the outage tracking website Downdetector. Microsoft 365 Status account acknowledged the outage on June 5 and stated that the issue was resolved the following day. However, Microsoft has now revealed that the outages were actually caused by a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack.
In a blog post, Microsoft stated, “Beginning in early June 2023, Microsoft identified surges in traffic against some services that temporarily impacted availability. Microsoft promptly opened an investigation and subsequently began tracking ongoing DDoS activity by the threat actor that Microsoft tracks as Storm-1359.”
A DDoS attack is a cyberattack in which hackers attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a server, service, or network by overwhelming it with internet traffic. Microsoft also added, “These attacks likely rely on access to multiple virtual private servers (VPS) in conjunction with rented cloud infrastructure, open proxies, and DDoS tools.”
According to a report by The Associated Press, Microsoft confirmed that the group calling itself Anonymous Sudan was responsible for the attacks. The group claimed responsibility on its Telegram social media channel. Some security researchers believe the group may have Russian affiliations.
However, Microsoft did not provide specific details about the number of affected customers or whether the impact was global. The company assured users that there is no evidence of customer data being accessed or compromised.
Microsoft revealed that the DDoS activity targeted layer 7 rather than layer 3 or 4. As a result, Microsoft has implemented additional protections, including tuning Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF), to better safeguard customers from similar DDoS attacks.
During the attack, several users reported that their Outlook desktop stopped functioning, preventing them from sending emails.
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