REDMOND, Wash., Jan. 26, 2001 — This morning at around 10:15 a.m. PST, Microsoft began to experience another denial of service attack. As a result of this attack, some customers experienced intermittent delays in accessing our Web properties for two 15-minute periods in the late morning.
We regret the inconvenience this attack has caused to our customers. Microsoft took immediate action to deal with the attack and restore normal operations. All sites were up and running normally by 12:30 p.m. Pacific time.
This attack was similar to Thursday’s attack, in which someone attempted to block legitimate access to our Web properties by flooding our network routers with large volumes of bogus requests. This attack was not related to the security or reliability of any Microsoft product. In fact, no Microsoft product was targeted as part of the attack. This attack was not an attempt at intrusion, and no customer data was compromised in any way. Microsoft’s Web servers and other Internet services running on Microsoft products continued to operate normally during this event.
Microsoft accepts full responsibility for the inconvenience that our customers have experienced over the past couple of days.
Through the experience of the past several days, we’ve learned some significant lessons. In the past, Microsoft has focused on understanding and protecting against attacks on Microsoft products in order to provide a better set of Internet services to customers and a more robust and secure set of products for enterprise customers. Unfortunately, as we have learned over the last few days, we did not apply sufficient self-defense techniques to our use of some third-party products at the front-end of parts of our core network infrastructure.
Through the painful lessons we’ve learned this week, we’ve already taken steps to change the architecture of our network infrastructure to improve its reliability and availability for customers. We will continue to examine our infrastructure architecture and processes in order to further safeguard our network resources and provide a great experience for our customers.
It’s unfortunate that anyone would engage in this kind of illegal activity. We are continuing to work with the FBI to identify those responsible for this situation.
Microsoft regrets any inconvenience to our customers. We will continue to monitor this situation closely and take appropriate action to provide our customers with the access and services they need, and will keep customers up to date with any new information as it becomes available.
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For more information, press only:
Rapid Response Team, Waggener Edstrom, (503) 443-7000, [email protected]
