CERT-In says global outage being leveraged to launch phishing attacks against CrowdStrike users

The Indian cyber security agency has said a phishing attack campaign has targeted users impacted by the recent global computer outage, with attackers impersonating CrowdStrike support staff to trick people by offering to help them with system recovery tools. According to a CERT-In advisory issued on Saturday said, these attack campaigns could “entice an unsuspected user to install unidentified malware, which could lead to sensitive data leakage, system crashes and data leak.”

The world suffered a major computer systems outage on July 19 due to a faulty update to the CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor software leading to crash of Microsoft Windows operating system. The event grounded numerous flights, hit business, banking and hospital systems across the globe including in India.