CrowdStrike warns about these phishing and fraud attempts following global outage

In the wake of the recent global outage, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has issued a warning about a surge in phishing and fraud attempts. As systems were disrupted and services went down, cybercriminals wasted no time exploiting the chaos to launch a wave of attacks. These malicious actors are taking advantage of the confusion and urgency created by the outage to trick people.

Phishing attempts are becoming increasingly sophisticated, making it difficult for even tech-savvy individuals to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent communications. 

Also read: Latest CrowdStrike update: Microsoft down, airlines affected, banks shut – Story so far

“On July 19, 2024, an issue present in a single content update for the CrowdStrike Falcon sensor impacting Windows operating systems was identified, and a fix was deployed,” CrowdStrike said in a blogpost.

CrowdStrike Intelligence has monitored for malicious activity leveraging the event as a lure theme and received reports that threat actors are conducting the following activity:

• Sending phishing emails posing as CrowdStrike support to customers
• Impersonating CrowdStrike staff in phone calls
• Posing as independent researchers, claiming to have evidence the technical issue is linked to a cyberattack and offering remediation insights
• Selling scripts purporting to automate recovery from the content update issue

Also read: What is Blue Screen of Death? The issue affecting all Windows machines running CrowdStrike 

CrowdStrike recommends organisations to make sure that they are communicating with legitimate CrowdStrike representatives through official channels and that they adhere to technical guidance the CrowdStrike support teams have provided.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has revealed that CrowdStrike’s update affected about 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one percent of all Windows machines.

What Happened?

On July 19th, CrowdStrike released a sensor configuration update to Windows systems. Sensor configuration updates are a part of the protection mechanisms of the Falcon platform. This configuration update triggered a logic error resulting in a system crash and blue screen (BSOD) on impacted systems. According to CrowStrike, this issue is not the result of or related to a cyberattack.