Microsoft Hit By Denial-Of-Service Attack

Microsoft says its network was hit early Thursday morning by a denial-of-service attack that affected access to several of its Web sites.

According to a company statement issued late Thursday, several of the company's Internet sites, including microsoft.com and msn.com, were intermittently available to customers throughout Thursday morning.

Microsoft says the attack was not related to the outage that occurred Wednesday as a result of domain name system (DNS) configurations. The company says the attack was not related to any Microsoft product, but was directed at the company's routers in one of its Internet data centers. The company did not say what vendor's routers were involved.

Forrester security analyst Frank Prince says it's quite likely that Microsoft was targeted as a result of the company's highly publicized woes the day before. "An attack on a set of routers does seem to be unrelated, but we don't have enough information to know for sure," he says.

He adds that hackers could have seen a moment of opportunity while the company grappled with its DNS settings. "A hacker or group of hackers could have said 'Gee whiz, I wonder if the attack that didn't work last week will work now.'"