Hongkongers warned that cybercriminals seizing on IT outage to launch phishing attacks
- Scams span from phishing attacks to impersonating CrowdStrike customer staff to steal information, Hong Kong computer security agency says
Cybercriminals are using the global outage triggered by a botched software update from CrowdStrike last week to cheat users with scams spanning from phishing attacks to impersonating customer service staff to steal information, a Hong Kong computer security agency has warned.
The Hong Kong Computer Emergency Response Team Co-ordination Centre said on Monday it was aware of criminals using the outage to launch further cyberattacks.
“[The centre] reminds the public to be aware of hackers using phishing attacks to commit fraud,” it said.
The criminals were sending phishing emails that purported to be from CrowdStrike support services and impersonating company staff in phone calls.
The centre was also aware of scammers posing as independent cybersecurity researchers who claimed to have insights on solutions and that trojan malware disguised as recovery tools was being distributed.
