Microsoft Denies Data Theft Claims Involving 30 Million Customer Data

A self-proclaimed hacktivist group known as ‘‘Anonymous Sudan’’ has claimed to have stolen credentials for millions of Microsoft customers by breaching the company’s servers. The Redmond-based software company on the other hand has categorically denied these claims.

Affiliated with the pro-Russian threat group, Killnet, Anonymous Sudan is known for employing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against its targets. In recent months, the threat actor made headlines with its repeated attacks on Microsoft and other Western entities.

Earlier this week, the group announced that it had successfully breached Microsoft’s network system and extracted a massive database having credentials of more than 30 million customers. The database which is now available for a going price of $50,000 includes information on Microsoft accounts, emails, and passwords. The group announced that interested parties can use their Telegram bot to contact and arrange a purchase of the database.

In the Telegram post, the group also posted a small sample of the allegedly stolen data to prove the authenticity of their hacking claims, in addition to warning readers that the incident would be refuted by Microsoft. The sample’s authenticity cannot be verified, for the time being.

In the aftermath of the post, Microsoft released a statement to various press outlets, where the spokesperson stated that the data was probably collected from sources other than the company. ‘’At this time, our analysis of the data shows that this is not a legitimate claim and an aggregation of data. We have seen no evidence that our customer data has been accessed or compromised,’’ the spokesperson said.

In recent months, Anonymous Sudan which Microsoft tracks as ‘’Storm-1359’’ has been repeatedly targeting the company. Around a month ago, Microsoft announced having suffered DDoS attacks by the group which affected the service continuity of its Outlook, Azure cloud services, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business products. At that time too, the company claimed that none of its customer data had been compromised.

For the time being, it cannot be confirmed whether Microsoft is investigating this incident any further or what would be its stance if Anonymous Sudan’s alleged claims prove to be true.