Cyber criminals have spread their arms to another Microsoft service and are threatening to spread it all to rest of the platforms as well.
Earlier this week, cyber criminals launched an attack on Microsoft’s Skype service, affecting India, Pakistan, Japan, South Africa, multiple countries across Europe and selected countries in the United States.
The outage began on June 19, and lasted for more than two days in many affected areas, leaving victims unable to access their accounts and receive messages or make voice calls through the app.
Hacking group CyberTeam claimed responsibility for the cyber attack launched on Skype, but also threatened to go after other platforms, such as gaming services as well. The outage experienced by Skype was “just the beginning of a new era, with Valve’s Steam gaming service to be the next target,” the group said in a twitter post.
Microsoft did acknowledge the issue. An initial statement from the firm said: “We are aware of an incident where users will either lose connectivity to the application or may be unable to send or receive messages. Some users will be unable to see a black bar that indicates that a group call is ongoing, and longer delays in adding users to their buddy list.”
Following users’ increasing complaints over the issue, the firm updated its statement to: “We have made some configuration corrections and mitigated the impact. We are continuing to monitor and we will post an update when the issue is fully resolved.”
It is speculated that the Skype outage was caused by a Disturbed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on its network. However, Microsoft still hasn’t given any detailed statement on what exactly happened with Skype.
