US Cyber Agency CISA Warns of Hackers Exploiting CrowdStrike Outage

Following a significant outage caused by cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a warning about malicious actors taking advantage of the situation.

Although the CrowdStrike outage was not due to a cyberattack, CISA reported observing threat actors exploiting the incident for phishing and other malicious activities.

In a statement released on Friday, CISA advised individuals to "avoid clicking on phishing emails or suspicious links," emphasizing the risk of email compromise and related scams during such chaotic events.

It's common for cybercriminals to exploit disruptions to launch attacks, especially phishing campaigns that can be quickly customized and deployed. A security researcher on X (formerly Twitter) noted that phishing emails impersonating CrowdStrike have already been sent out, some falsely claiming to offer fixes for the "CrowdStrike apocalypse" in exchange for payments to cryptocurrency wallets.

The real solutions involve either restarting affected computers repeatedly to apply the fixed update or manually removing the defective file from each compromised machine. CrowdStrike has confirmed that the software bug causing the issue has been fixed, but manual remediation may lead to ongoing disruptions.

Rachel Tobac, a social engineering expert and CEO of SocialProof Security, highlighted on X that criminals often use such outages to deceive victims into revealing passwords and sensitive information. "Verify people are who they say they are before taking sensitive actions," Tobac advised.

The outage began early Friday when a faulty software update from CrowdStrike caused numerous Windows computers running its security software to crash. While the company has addressed the bug, the recovery process requires significant manual intervention.

CISA is collaborating with CrowdStrike, federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial partners, as well as critical infrastructure and international entities, to mitigate the effects and assist with the necessary fixes.