Microsoft was initially hesitant to admit that DDoS attacks by the murky upstart were to blame, but has since admitted that this was the case.
Although, they did not immediately confirm the number of customers affected by the attack or whether it had any global impact, Microsoft has now provided certain details on the matter.
A Microsoft spokesperson stated that the threat group behind the attacks has confirmed to have been ‘Anonymous Sudan.’ At the time, it took ownership of the situation via its Telegram social media channel. Some cybersecurity experts think the group is based in Russia.
On Friday, an explanation on the matter by Microsoft was published in a blog post following a request from The Associated Press made two days prior. The post, which was sparse on data, stated that the attacks "temporarily impacted availability" of some services. According to the report, the attackers targeted "disruption and publicity" and used probable rented cloud infrastructure and virtual private networks to flood Microsoft servers with attacks from so-called botnets of zombie machines spread around the world.
According to Microsoft, there is no proof that any customer information was accessed or compromised.
In regards to the severity of attacks, Jake Williams, a prominent cybersecurity researcher and a former NSA offensive hacker says “We really have no way to measure the impact if Microsoft doesn’t provide that info.” William added he was unaware of Outlook being attacked previously at this scale.
“We know some resources were inaccessible for some, but not others. This often happens with DDoS of globally distributed systems,” Williams added. “Microsoft’s apparent unwillingness to provide an objective measure of customer impact probably speaks to the magnitude,” he said.
While DDoS attacks do not come under the severity radar in cyber activities since they only make websites inaccessible without even penetrating them, security professionals believe that they can however disrupt the operations of several million of online users if they are successful in exploiting services of software service giants, like Microsoft, since a large chunk of global commerce rely on such organizations.
