FBI Probes Attack On Microsoft

Microsoft Inc. says a distributed denial of
service
(DDoS) attack brought down several of its Web sites Thursday, and access
remained blocked early today.

The software giant said in a statement that it has notified the FBI. The
Bureau
headquarters in Washington, D.C. referred a Newsbytes call to the
Seattle office, which had no comment.

"It is unfortunate that an individual or group of individuals would
engage in this kind of illegal activity," Microsoft said in a news release
issued tonight.

Microsoft.com, MSNBC.com, MSN.com and Hotmail.com remained blocked
early Friday, EST.

The attack comes one day after Microsoft corrected a staffer's
configuration
error that led to a 23-hour outage that started Tuesday evening. The snafu
prevented Microsoft's domain name servers (DNS) from communicating
with the rest of the Internet, leaving access to company sites intermittent
or blocked altogether.

Microsoft said the staffer's misconfiguration and Thursday's
attack were unrelated.

A DDoS attack is carried out by hackers using special software,
flooding a network and denying access to legitimate traffic.

All the safeguards and technological expertise will not protect a
Web site from a denial of service attack, said Ryan Russell, an incident
analyst with SecurityFocus.com. Even Microsoft.

"These are really hard to defend against," Russell told Newsbytes. "They
can nail some of the best prepared companies on the Internet."

Russell said Microsoft technicians told him Thursday evening that they
had found a way to block the attack. But the sites were inaccessible
again late Thursday and early today.

"Some attacks are done well enough that you can't tell them apart from
normal traffic, so you don't know what to block and what to let through,"
said Russell.

Microsoft said its servers were running normally throughout the
event, but the attack prevented access to company Web sites.

Earlier this week a hacking group known as the "Prime Suspectz" took
credit for defacing the New Zealand Microsoft site, which was altered to
read: "Another Micro$oft was hacked?" and "Security wuz broke'n."

Microsoft officials said Wednesday that the New Zealand defacement
was not related to the technician's error.

Last October a hacker broke into Microsoft's corporate networks through
a security hole in the company's access system.