Written by staff writer.
Microsoft has confirmed that the hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan were behind a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on its Outlook, OneDrive, and cloud platforms earlier this month.
Cybersecurity analysts initially believed Anonymous Sudan to be a cohort of religiously motivated hackers from Sudan who have been conducting DDoS attacks since January in response to a far-right activist burning a copy of the Quran. They first focused on targeting entities in Nordic countries, home to the erstwhile book burner.
US-based Microsoft, who refer to the group as Storm-1359, began seeing surges in traffic against some services that temporarily impacted availability in early June. Microsoft says they observed the hackers launching HTTP(s) flood attacks that sought to exhaust the system resources with a high load of SSL/TLS handshakes and HTTP(s) requests processing; cache bypass attacks that bypass the CDN layer and can result in overloading the origin servers; and slowloris attacks which occur when the client opens a connection to a web server, requests a resource, and then fails to…
