Hi Readers! Do you know that on July 30th, there occurred a DDoS attack that was targeted mainly at Microsoft Azure? Now, this significant distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack has a vast effect on a global outage that causes a scratch globally on various Azure cloud services along with Microsoft’s products like Microsoft 365. The blog will help you to know what exactly happened during the Microsoft Azure DDoS attack in July and how it affected the business world globally.
What is Microsoft Azure DDoS Attack?
Do you know what a DDoS attack is? It essentially means that there is a directed attack against a target server, network, or service wherein huge traffic from the Internet gets pointed at it. This malicious activity is performed to deface normal traffic to the target site and make it inaccessible to its genuine users.
The incident of the Microsoft azure DDoS attack lasted almost eight hours, disrupting services from 11:45 UTC to 19:43 UTC. The attack flooded Microsoft’s systems and was exacerbated by an error in mitigation, which had the effect of increasing the impact of the cyberattack, Dark Reading, and Help Net Security report.
What Happened on 30th July 2024?
On the same day, Microsoft azure DDoS Attack on itself, thereby eventually affecting its services on the July 30, 2024.
It all started when Microsoft security groups noticed increased activity in the form of traffic pertaining to Azure services. A few days back, there was a Microsoft Outage due to Crowdstrike Falcon failure, which is a cybersecurity platform. It looks like the outage had been caused by a DDoS attack, despite the fact that Microsoft had protections in place, according to Sean Wright, head of Application Security at Featurespace. “Similarly to CrowdStrike’s issue a few weeks ago, it looks like a mistake happened within the software that was being used to protect from DDoS attacks“, Wright says.
To know more about it, read here.
The Attack: Microsoft Azure DDoS Attack
Initial Detection
It was pretty big—the attacker was sending millions of requests per second. They hit those multiple Azure regions at the same time. As a result of this, so many of our services were disrupted.
Scale and Scope
This Microsoft Azure DDoS Attack though happened for a short period of time but here the attacker send millionsof request with full intensions. The attack happened in multiple regions of Azure at the same time and many of the services were disrupted.
Duration of the Microsoft Azure DDoS Attack
They took their toll for a few hours as teams from Microsoft struggled to cool the situation and get things back to normal.
To read more about how the Microsoft Azure attack happens, read here.
Mitigation Efforts
Automated Defenses
Namely, in order to sop up and filter out the undesired traffic, Azure’s anti- DDoS measures were engaged from the beginning of the attack.
Manual Intervention
Realising that attackers could interrupt the service, Microsoft’s security personnel then had to watch the strategies of defence and adjust the counter plans by hand.
Communication
In this particular case more prominently Microsoft Azure Ddos Attack, the company offered updates concerning the occurrence and the estimated time to resume normalcy to the meetings of the clients who were affected by the occurrence of the incident.
Consequences of the Attack
While the actual attack on Microsoft Azure and response that has been described was not accompanied with significant issues for the target company and its clients after the attack has been executed, this particularity of the DDoS attack bears certain aftertaste in terms of consequences that affected both Microsoft and its clients.
Service Disruptions
Downtime
Azure draws on a discretionary access control list that is to say that most of the services that were on this platform were unavailable for some time and that affected hosted applications and websites majorly.
Performance Issues
Some services after the first mitigation were slow again because some effects of the attack persisted.
Customer Impact
Business Operations: Certain companies that depended on Azure also faced disruptions which implies they lost a chance to make some revenue and customers’ disgruntlement.
Data Access
Held in place by their seat belt of captured options, the users also had it worse as they could also readily vouch that it was very difficult to get at data and applications at the time of the attack.
Financial and Reputational Impact
Cost of Mitigation of the Microsoft Azure DDoS Attack
Withdrawing an attack of this dimension has an accompanying resource consideration; therefore, it has a cost implication for Microsoft.
Reputation
Frequent mild ones or severe ones, nonetheless, reverse this notion of a tainted reputation in the eyed customers of a CSP and, therefore, erode trust in the business for as long as required.
Conclusion
The latest Microsoft Azure ddos attack on July 30th again proved that CSPs still have big issues to solve concerning service availability and security. Although Microsoft had good defense mechanisms that dealt with the situation and some very professional teams by its side protecting the company’s systems, the attack awoke the organization to the fact that investment in cybersecurity should not stop.
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