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Microsoft seeks hacker aid
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January 29, 2001: 1:48 p.m. ET
Software giant will use backup systems from Akamai Technologies
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - After falling victim to computer hacker attacks that rendered some of its Web properties inaccessible last week, Microsoft has turned to Akamai Technologies to help guard against future outages.
The news, first reported in Monday's edition of The Wall Street Journal, gave a lift to Akamai (AKAM: Research, Estimates) shares, which were trading $2.69 higher at $32.44, a 9 percent gain.
Although he did not provide a dollar amount, a Microsoft (MSFT: Research, Estimates) spokesman on Monday confirmed that the company has hired Akamai, which provides services that help speed and manage the delivery of data over the Internet, to provide a backup for Microsoft's domain-name servers.
A representative of Akamai was not immediately available for comment.
 Under the terms of their agreement, Akamai will operate four such servers, which route users who try to access Web sites by their familiar "dot.com" or "dot.net" names to the corresponding numeric addressed which are used to identify the Web servers on the public Internet.
With the back-up domain-name servers in place, Microsoft is hoping to prevent future hacker attacks, such as the two separate ones that occurred last week which effectively blocked users from accessing its Web servers, including those that host its "Microsoft Network" pages, "Hotmail" e-mail services as well as Microsoft.com, its corporate Web site.
While Microsoft attributed some of its problems last week to internal technical problems, the company also acknowledged that hackers who launched a so-called "denial of service" attack were to blame in part for the outages.
A denial of service attack occurs when someone floods a system with so many requests for Web pages that that legitimate traffic is slowed or halted. Similar attacks took down several high-profile Web sites, including Yahoo!, eBay and CNN.com, last year.
Microsoft shares were unchanged at $64. 
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