Microsoft: DDoS attacks behind recent disruptions

Microsoft has disclosed that its Outlook web portal, OneDrive, and Azure Portal had been disrupted between June 7 and 9 as a result of Layer 7 distributed denial-of-service attacks deployed by hacktivist threat operation Anonymous Sudan, also known as Storm-1359, reports BleepingComputer. Such a confirmation comes after Microsoft earlier attributed the Azure outage to a significant increase in network traffic. Anonymous Sudan, which has already taken credit for the attacks and demanded $1 million from Microsoft, was observed to have leveraged three Layer 7 DDoS attack types, including Slowloris, HTTP(S) flood attacks, and cache bypass. "These attacks likely rely on access to multiple virtual private servers (VPS) in conjunction with rented cloud infrastructure, open proxies, and DDoS tools. We have seen no evidence that customer data has been accessed or compromised," said Microsoft. While Anonymous Sudan has claimed to launch the DDoS attacks in retaliation to the U.S. government's involvement in Sudan, the operation has been suspected by some cybersecurity researchers to be associated with Russia.