A couple of technology glitches have Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) in the headlines – one for an outage, another for being hacked.
A Microsoft Website indicated Saturday an online storage service for businesses worldwide has “recovered to over 99% availability across all sub-regions.”
The problems Friday afternoon were triggered by Microsoft’s failure to renew a security certificate which expired.
The outage affected an online service that stores data for a wide range of business customers. The service is called Azure. Microsoft has apologized for the lapse. The Website for the service known as Azure says Microsoft will monitor the systems for another 24 hours and that some customers may still encounter intermittent failures.
The certificate is needed to properly run online services such as Azure which use an “https” protocol to block unauthorized users from accessing information.
Azure’s failure illuminates the pitfalls of storing important information in remote data centers. Online storage, often called “cloud computing,” has been growing in appeal.
The Hack
Microsoft also said Friday that a small number of its computers were infected by malicious software in a cyberattack similar to those experienced by Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL).
There’s no evidence that customers were affected, Microsoft said in a blog post. Some of the techniques were similar to those documented by others, and the investigation is ongoing, Microsoft said.
The incident follows recent attacks that hit more than 40 companies, including microblogging service Twitter Inc., and were linked to an Eastern European hacker gang trying to steal company secrets, Bloomberg News reported Feb. 20, citing two people familiar with the matter.
“This type of cyberattack is no surprise to Microsoft and other companies that must grapple with determined and persistent adversaries,” the company said in the blog post.
In the Apple breach, some the company’s internal Mac computers were infected by malware spread through an iPhone- developer website, according to the people familiar with law enforcement’s investigations. Apple said it had no evidence that any data was stolen.
Facebook, operator of the largest social network with more than 1 billion members, said Feb. 16 that some of its employees’ laptops were infected after visiting a mobile developer’s site. Twitter, the microblogging site with more than 200 million active users, said Feb. 2 that hackers may have accessed information on 250,000 users.
Security professionals call the recent incidents “waterhole attacks,” since the hackers were targeting a desirable class of victims — in this case, software developers congregating at a communal gathering place, like a waterhole in the desert — rather than specific companies.
