As reported by the BBC, the latest Microsoft outage was the result of a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) cyber attack. This time, thousands of users had difficulties accessing various services such as Outlook and Minecraft for almost 10 hours.
This incident occurred less than two weeks after a serious global outage, which caused approximately 8.5 million computers with Microsoft systems to stop functioning correctly. The outage affected sectors such as healthcare and tourism; its root cause was identified as a faulty software update conducted by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike.
Kamil Sadkowski, an analyst at the ESET antivirus laboratory, comments:
In recent weeks, we’ve learnt that we should expect the unexpected more than ever before. Two major outages in such a short period are unprecedented and may not be entirely independent of each other. Cybercriminals are clearly testing new boundaries and showing us they continue to enhance their skills.
A DDoS attack involves flooding servers or networks with a massive number of fake requests from many different sources. This leads to an overload, making it impossible for normal users to access the company’s resources. The goal of such attacks is to either cause a system failure or significantly lower its performance.
These types of attacks are not among the most threatening, but they are very conspicuous. Cybercriminals can cause chaos and draw attention from many people. They can be seen as some sort of show of force. However, there should not be concern about our data being at risk during such incidents.
Source: https://ceo.com.pl/kolejna-awaria-microsoftu-tym-razem-to-cyberatak-11673
