Reported by Joe Tidy

Cyber-security experts and agencies around the world are warning people about a wave of opportunistic hacking attempts linked to the IT outage.

Although there is no evidence that the CrowdStrike outage was caused by malicious activity, some bad actors are attempting to take advantage.

Cyber agencies in the UK and Australia are warning people to be vigilant to fake emails, calls and websites that pretend to be official.

And CrowdStrike head George Kurtz encouraged users to make sure they were speaking to official representatives from the company before downloading fixes.

We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” he said in a blog post. 

“Our blog and technical support will continue to be the official channels for the latest updates.”

His words were echoed by cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt, who runs the well-known Have I Been Pwned security website.

“An incident like this that has commanded so many headlines and has people worried is a gift to scammers,” he said.

Mr Hunt was responding to a warning from the Australian Signals Directorate (known as the ASD, the equivalent of the UK’s GCHQ or the US’s National Security Agency) which issued an alert about hackers sending out bogus software fixes claiming to be from CrowdStrike.

Read full report: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq5xy12pynyo.amp