The Microsoft attacks happened on Thursday and Friday of last week. In a statement issued following Thursday’s attack, the company said it had notified the FBI. Following Friday’s attack, Rick Devenuti, Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Microsoft added:
“Microsoft accepts full responsibility for the inconvenience that our customers have experienced over the past couple of days… Unfortunately, as we have learned over the last few days, we did not apply sufficient self-defence techniques to our use of some third-party products at the front-end of parts of our core network infrastructure.
“Through the painful lessons we've learned this week, we've already taken steps to change the architecture of our network infrastructure to improve its reliability and availability for customers.”
Some experts say that Microsoft left itself wide open to attack due to the configuration of its DNS (Domain Name System) servers. DNS is responsible for translating cryptic IP (Internet Protocol) addresses into more easily remembered domain names and vice versa, routing mail to its proper destinations and other fundamental internet services.
A survey run last week by a DNS consultancy, Men & Mice, shows that approximately 38% of .com domains have the same DNS configuration problem that allowed some of Microsoft's most popular web sites to crash for over 24 hours and made it vulnerable to the denial of service attacks.
The survey was carried out on a random sample of almost 4,910 active .com web sites. It showed that 38% of the domains are running all of their DNS Server on the same network segment and thus creating a single point of failure with regard to DNS.
Director of Surveys at Men and Mice, Sjofn Agustsdottir, said that "It is clear that a stunning number of companies have serious DNS configuration problems which can lead to failure at any time. A single point of failure can go undetected for months which is simply a disaster waiting to happen."