Microsoft confirms blackout caused by hacker attack

Microsoft admits to becoming a victim of cyberattacks causing Microsoft's 365 software suite outages at the beginning of June.

On June 16th, Microsoft stated on their blog, that they identified surges in traffic against some of their company services that temporarily impacted the availability.

“These attacks likely rely on access to multiple virtual private servers (VPS) in conjunction with rented cloud infrastructure, open proxies, and DDoS tools,” said Microsoft.

The company claimed to have opened an investigation and tracked ongoing DDoS activity by the threat actor identified as Storm-1359, also known as the pro-Russian hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan.

“We have seen no evidence that customer data has been accessed or compromised,” said the company in their statement.

Microsoft 365 suite down

Microsoft 365 software suite, including Teams and Outlook, was a couple of hours down for thousands of American users on June 5th.

The Anonymous Sudan claimed the hacker gang claimed responsibility for the outage on their encrypted Telegram channel, after declaring the start of a new campaign dedicated to targeting US companies and infrastructure.

More potential victims

On June 12th the gang claimed an attack on global shipping giant United Parcel Service (UPS). About 80% of users reported having problems with the UPS website, while the other 20% reported problems with tracking their packages and logging in to their accounts.

On their Telegram channel, Anonymous Sudan also warned Microsoft, that they are planning to attack OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The warning came as a response to Microsoft’s initial naming of the outage as a “technical issue.”