Malicious websites and unofficial code are being used to try and scam people during the Crowdstrike outage, Australia’s Cyber Security Centre has warned.
ACSC’s Australian Signals Directorate, one of Australia’s leading spy and counterintelligence agencies, has warned that fake websites and code are being released online, claiming to fix the global technical outage caused by Crowdstrike’s software update.
The malicious sites are mimicking the Crowdstrike website, providing fake code and instructions.
“ASD’s ACSC understands a number of malicious websites and unofficial code are being released claiming to help entities recover from the widespread outages caused by the CrowdStrike technical incident,” it said.
“ASD’s ACSC strongly encourages all consumers to source their technical information and updates from official CrowdStrike sources only.”
The full list of fake websites, identified by Crowdstrike, are listed on the official Crowdstrike website, which can be found here.
It is strongly advised that people avoid clicking into any of the fake websites.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said other scammers are using the outage to rip Australians off through emails and phone calls.
“I would like to ask Australians to be really careful and be really on the lookout for attempts to use this to scam Australians and to scam small businesses,” O’Neil
“So what we are seeing some reporting of is attempts to conduct phishing through the incident that’s just occurred.
“If you see an email. If you see a text message that looks a little bit funny, that indicates something about CrowdStrike or it outages, just stop.
“Don’t put in any details. If someone has called you and is suggesting that they’re going to help you talk you through a reboot of your system, I would hang up the phone.”
“So just have a think about whether it makes sense.”
O’Neil said people should follow the Scamwatch steps to ensure they don’t fall victim to a scam: Stop, step back and think about what the scammers are saying, then protect any private information.
