IT Outage Phishing Scams

A couple of weeks ago, there was a major Microsoft IT Outage due to an antivirus update from cybersecurity company, Crowdstrike. This outage affected many businesses, airports, banks and any company using Microsoft. Over 1,300 flights were canceled, and thousands were delayed.

Since this was a huge news story and effected so many people, it is a very intriguing topic to cybercriminals. Cybercriminals like to use big events to help create their next scams. Cybercriminals created fake websites claiming to be IT workers that could help with this outage. They even included files on these fake websites that appear to be software updates to get your computer up a running again, but really it’s malware. If anyone downloaded these files, malware is on their computer and the cybercriminals can now see all the personal data.

TIPS:

• Remember to always think before you click and never open attachments or links from unexpected emails. This may have been a website scam, but cybercriminals always make a variety of different scams on the same topics.
• Make sure you only are using trusted sources. Any updates should be coming from your IT team.

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