TO ADD insult to injury, a warning has gone out that a series of scams are following in the wake of the CrowdStrike National IT Outage.

The Australian Signals Directorate Australian Cyber Security Centre has warned that several malicious websites and unofficial codes are being released claiming to help entities recover from the widespread outages caused by the CrowdStrike technical incident.  

Director of the Container Transport Alliance Australia, (CTAA), Neil Chambers, urged everyone to be extra vigilant to avoid these scams.

In a statement issued on Saturday morning, 20 July, Mr Chambers said the national IT outage on Friday afternoon (around 3pm AEST) impacted critical infrastructure and services across Australia, causing significant disruption to airports and airlines, retail, media and financial institutions.

“The impact seems to have been less severe on utilities, health, and emergency response,” Mr Chambers said.

“CTAA has ascertained that there were some significant, yet thankfully short-lived, impacts on container logistics interfaces across Australia.

“Patrick Terminals’ operations were impacted for a few hours before landside receival and delivery (R&D) operations could resume. Some export cut-off times for vessels in Melbourne and Brisbane have been extended, while import discharge operations were also impacted.

“Notably, import storage time extensions have been updated, while no-show and wrong time zone fees for road transport operators have been waived.

“Victoria International Container Terminal (VICT) in Melbourne was similarly impacted. VICT was able to resume truck transactions from the midnight zone on Saturday morning (20 July). Transport operators affected by the outage are contacting VICT landside operations for assistance with alternative slots.

“Empty Container Parks (ECPs) operated by Qube Logistics across Australia had to cease transport operations on Friday afternoon due to the IT outage.”

Mr Chambers said the Federal Government instigated the National Coordination Mechanism (NCM), which is coordinated by Emergency Management Australia (EMA) and the Federal Department of Home Affairs (DHA), with meetings held on Friday evening and Saturday morning.

“The NCM brings together agencies of the Australian Government, state and territory governments and industry and private sector stakeholders to assist in coordinating any large-scale response required.

“The global Cyber-Security platform provider, CrowdStrike, delivered a comprehensive update on a recent system configuration issue that resulted in the IT ‘crash’ impacting on Microsoft Windows devices, and what CrowdStrike is doing to work with customers impacted by the outage.”

The CrowdStrike Blog is being updated constantly with remediation advice as the situation evolves.