SAN DIEGO — Be extremely cautious of any messages you receive related to the CrowdStrike outage. Scammers are taking advantage of the outage to impersonate CrowdStrike or offer help, mainly through email and social media.
Even something as simple as posting about your delayed flight on social media could prompt a scammer to target you. If you get a message regarding the CrowdStrike outage, it's likely a scam.
"Immediately after it happened the attackers sprung into action, and they decided that this is a good opportunity to take advantage of," Behar said.
Nikolas Behar is an adjunct professor of cyber security at the University of San Diego. He said people are mainly targeted through email and social media and are asking to share personal information or download a file.
"It can give the attackers back doors into your systems, it can log all of the information that you're typing onto your keyboard, It can take screenshots, it can hijack sessions, it just depends on what the attacker decides to do with that particular file," Behar said.
Behar said some people receiving scam messages weren't even affected by the outage.
"If somebody's asking you about CrowdStrike, and you're at home and you don't work for a very large organization or you're on your home computer, there's a good chance that it's going to be a scam," Behar said.
If you get a message regarding CrowdStrike, do not respond. If you are experiencing real issues with CrowdStrike, visit the company's official site.
"Call them directly on the number on their website or on the back of your card or in the app," Behar said. "Don't go ahead and respond to that email or call the number that's been sent in the email, always reach out to the organization via their official communication channels."
Behar said scams referencing the CrowdStrike outage will eventually die down as time goes on. CrowdStrike also has a guidance hub on its blog, you can find that here.
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