Microsoft Outage Caused by Cyber Attackers

By Sheku Jusu-Sheriff

Marketing and Sales Manager, Africa Risk Management and Compliance Partners

Key Facts about this Incident:

• Microsoft has said that the outage on their systems and services in July 2024 was caused by a targeted Cyber Attack which affected thousands of users.
• This disruption of Microsoft Azure Cloud services was caused by a type of cyberattack known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). This involves malicious actors overloading a platform with unwanted traffic until it collapses.
• It highlighted a problem within the Microsoft defence systems. Instead of solving the problem, it made it worse.
• A wide range of Microsoft clients were impacted including NatWest Bank and Oxford United FC (MSN).
• July hasn't been a good month for Microsoft as its services were also severely impacted by the CrowdStrike software update issue.

The Microsoft Outage has shown us how important it is to ensure that companies have their Cybersecurity in check to prevent Cyber Attacks from happening. This is essential in these times as Cyberattacks tend to occur even more frequently than they have in the past with over 35 Billion known records being breached so far in 2024 (IT Governance).

If Cyber attackers can breach and impact a Transnational Company as big as Microsoft, then Banks and Financial services across Sub-Saharan Africa need to spend the necessary resources to ensure that their business critical systems are protected from cyber attackers.

At ARMC, our Cybersecurity team offers a comprehensive cybersecurity risk assessments of your business. We identify your cyber security risks; control gaps and advise you on actions to mitigate them.

To find out more, please email [email protected]