Denial of Service Hits Microsoft Microsoft Admits to a Hacker Attack internet.com Staff
After yesterday's Microsoft outages were blamed on what company officials are saying was a "mistaken configuration," a statement just issued by Microsoft acknowledges that today's outages were the result of a denial of service attack against the routers that direct traffic to the company's Web sites.
As a result of todays attack, access to some of the Microsoft Internet properties, including Microsoft.com and MSN.com, was intermittent for many customers throughout the morning.
A Denial of Service attack paralyzes network and Web site operations by flooding them with useless traffic, blocking customer access, and can even cause entire networks to crash. Today's attack was an attempt to interfere with the routers in one of Microsoft's Internet data centers. While Microsoft's servers were running normally throughout the event, the attack prevented access to some of the company's Web sites.
While officials at Microsoft still assert that today's issue was completely separate from yesterday's outage, there are some who question whether the separate incidences are in fact related.
"I don't find it plausible that (the two outages) were completely separate, given that the symptoms appear to be the same," says Ric Steinberger, technical director of Seattle-based SecurityPortal. "It's hard to believe that one thing went bad on Tuesday and Wednesday, and a completely different thing, a denial-of-service attack, happens today." For more on this story go to internet.com News
