CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz is warning businesses and individuals that scammers will try to exploit Friday’s worldwide tech outage for their own nefarious gain by posing as company employees or other tech specialists.
The global IT outage — caused by a faulty update to the cybersecurity firm’s software — led millions of computers to crash, causing disruptions to businesses, hospitals, banks, government services and travel providers around the world.
While the issue was “quickly identified” and a fix was deployed by early Friday, Kurtz warned that “bad actors will try to exploit events like this” by creating new phishing scams that involve posing as tech specialists offering to help anyone still affected by the outage.
According to the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Center, an “increase in phishing referencing this outage” has already been observed, “as opportunistic malicious actors seek to take advantage of the situation.”
“I encourage everyone to remain vigilant and ensure that you’re engaging with official CrowdStrike representatives,” Kurtz wrote in a statement on the company’s blog. “Our blog and technical support will continue to be the official channels for the latest updates.”
The massive technology outage, which affected Windows 365 Cloud PCs, was first reported late on Thursday. More than 5,000 flights around the world were canceled Friday as a result of the outage.
By late Saturday afternoon, airlines had canceled more than 2,300 flights, according to data compiled by tracking service FlightAware.
According to Microsoft’s VP of enterprise and OS security, the mishap affected approximately 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than 1% of all Windows-based machines.
With News Wire Services
