FBI investigates attacks on Microsoft - CNN site down

Network security experts said two of Microsoft's main sites, Microsoft.com and MSN.com, suffered accessibility problems for the fourth day in a row. In addition, CNN.com and CNNfn.com were down for "less than an hour" on Friday due to an internal problem, not a hacker attack, a CNN spokeswoman said. The company said it was checking whether the outage was the result of a technical glitch or human error but had ruled out an attack by hackers.

Although surfers were able to access the Microsoft sites, they often found themselves cut off before the pages were fully loaded, according to Keynote Systems, a company that monitors web performance. "At around 10:15 [a.m. PST, 1815 GMT], it really went downhill," Daniel Todd, chief technologist for Keynote's public services group, said Friday afternoon. "We saw about a 7-per-cent success rate for requests to Microsoft.com and MSN.com. Most recently, one response out of 70 [has been] successful." According to technology news service ZDNet, the attacks appeared consistent with an assault by hackers on Microsoft's servers, whereas an outage Thursday appeared to come from attacks on the routers that direct web-surfers to Microsoft's network of websites. A spokesman for the FBI in Seattle, meanwhile, confirmed that the government's cyber-sleuths were investigating Thursday's incident but said they have still not positively confirmed it as an attack by hackers. That outage lasted for about two hours and prevented millions of users from reaching sites such as msn.com, the third most popular site on the web. The suspected denial-of- service attack came just a day after a supposed technical glitch brought down most of Microsoft's sites for almost 24 hours.

The embarrassing outages came as Microsoft is trying to bolster its reputation among corporate customers. The company launched a 200-million-dollar advertising campaign Monday touting its business software in competition with Oracle, IBM and Sun Microsystems. The theme for the ads is "software for the agile business". "For about two hours, the attack was 100 per cent successful," Eric Siegel, senior Internet consultant for Keynote, a well-known security firm, said of Thursday's incident. Siegel noted that a flaw in Microsoft's network design - which was highlighted by outages Tuesday and Wednesday - might have given the attackers the idea to flood Microsoft's key routers. The company's main servers linking website names to their numerical computer addresses are centrally located, making them an easy target for a denial-of-service attack. Hackers can bombard these servers with millions of request for data, clogging them and making them inaccessible to bona fide users. "If Microsoft is using a single router as the entrance to a series of DNS servers, and you take down that router, then the attack would be very successful," Siegel said. Essentially, Microsoft's websites would virtually disappear from the Internet. Other experts voiced doubt about whether Tuesday's and Wednesday's outages were really due to a technical glitch as Microsoft claimed.

"Probably what the intruder has done is identified another single point of failure," said Joel de la Garza, a security consultant with Securify.com. "Microsoft probably didn't know what happened to them. I would assume they are both denial-of-service attacks that they misdiagnosed." "This is an incredibly stupid design," said Russ Cooper, moderator of the popular NTBugTraq mailing list, which follows problems in popular Microsoft software. "There is a single point of failure in Microsoft's worldwide DNS system. It would be possible to design a more robust, and thus more failure-proof, system for such an incredibly important service such as DNS."

(dpa)