CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage: Australia warns of ‘malicious websites’ offering recovery
- Australia’s cyber intelligence agency urges consumers to source their technical information from official CrowdStrike sources only
Australia was one of many countries affected by the outage that caused havoc worldwide after a botched software update from CrowdStrike.
The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) – the country’s cyber intelligence agency – said “a number of malicious websites and unofficial code are being released claiming to help entities recover from the widespread outages caused by the CrowdStrike technical incident”.
Security experts said CrowdStrike’s routine update of its widely used cybersecurity software apparently did not undergo adequate quality checks before it was deployed.
The latest version of its Falcon Sensor software was meant to make CrowdStrike clients’ systems more secure against hacking by updating the threats it defends against. But a faulty code in the update files resulted in one of the most widespread tech outages in recent years for companies using Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
