Microsoft Retains Akamai As A Hedge Against Hackers

In a bid to prevent a repeat of last week's crippling Web
site outages, Microsoft Corp. has retained Akamai
Technologies Inc. to host backup severs to which Microsoft can
default in the event of a hacker attack or technical failure.

"Our primary (Domain Name Server) network is still hosted at
Microsoft, but Akamai is now hosting some of our secondary servers,"
Microsoft spokesperson Rick Miller said. "What this means is that if
for any reason a customer does not get an answer from Microsoft's
primary network, there will be another network to point them to our"
Internet sites.

Microsoft last week learned the hard way the dangers of maintaining
a centralized Internet presence, when many of the company's most
heavily used sites were rendered inaccessible, once because of an
internal technical gaffe and then again due to an opportunistic
electronic attack.

Since both the technical failure and the subsequent hacker attack
struck Microsoft at the core of its DNS network, many of the
company's most popular sites - including Hotmail.com, MSNBC.com and
Microsoft.com, remained unavailable for the better part of Wednesday
and Thursday last week.

Neither the technical gaffe, nor the subsequent denial of service
attack actually affected any of Microsoft's Web sites, but because
the network was centralized, it had a single point of failure,
Miller said.

"In the future we will continue to distribute our DNS," he said.

Microsoft's Web site woes began late Tuesday night last week after a
lone Microsoft technician mistakenly installed an incorrect software
configuration on some of Microsoft's critical domain name servers.

After many hours Microsoft repaired the problem Wednesday afternoon,
only to be struck within the space of a few hours by a denial of
service (DoS) attack which took out many of the same sites affected
by the technical mistake.

While Microsoft said that the attack and the glitch were completely
unrelated from a technical standpoint, Internet security experts
speculated that the electronic vandals behind the DoS attack
probably chose to attack on Thursday in order to exploit confusion
surrounding the first failure.

While Miller conceded the Web site outages were a "learning lesson"
for Microsoft, he said that the company has maintained a very high
level of security given the rate at which it is attacked.

"We combat attacks on a daily basis," Miller said. "We've very
successfully defended out networks for a long time."

Microsoft made headlines last October, when the company confirmed
that a hacker had broken into Microsoft's corporate networks by
exploiting a security hole in its remote access system.