December 5th, 2013, 08:06 GMT · By Bogdan Popa
Microsoft Denies Having Been Hacked by Anonymous
Last month, Microsoft’s websites, including Outlook.com, MSN.com, and Windows.com, went down with Redmond managing to bring all pages back online in a matter of minutes.
Shortly after that, an individual who claimed to be part of Anonymous hacker group posted a statement on Pastebin to say that Microsoft’s websites have actually been taken down following a larger DDoS attack aimed at Redmond’s Japanese servers.
And still, Microsoft claims that this wasn’t the case, explaining that it only experienced some DNS-related issues that have been fixed very fast. Although it did register some attacks, none managed to break down its servers and take websites offline.
“We are aware of reports of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack where it appears that Microsoft was not the intended target. We do not believe this alleged attack is related to any interruption of Microsoft online services,” a company spokesperson told The Register.
Anonymous, on the other hand, said that they were behind the outage and all websites that went down in November and belonging to Microsoft have actually been targeted by its DDoS attack.
“A couple days ago a DDoS attack was launched at Japanese Microsoft (Domain) Websites and Servers. We are sorry to report that the Japanese Microsoft Websites and Servers did not go down as planned. Although something did go down. We took the pretty much the entire Microsoft domains down,” Anonymous said.
There are still some discrepancies between the two versions of the story though. Microsoft’s outage occurred on November 21 and lasted for only a few minutes, while the statement issued by Anonymous came two days later and claimed to have taken down many more Microsoft services.
Anonymous, however, claims that the attacks have been part of Operation KillingBay, even though Microsoft barely has something to do with dolphin hunting in Taiji.
