Guidance Following Last Week’s Global IT Outage

Hello,

FYI, the UK National Cyber Security Centre, has posted guidance following last week’s global IT outage

“Following the global IT outage on Friday 19 July, affected organisations should put in place vendor mitigations. The NCSC is also warning about an increase in related phishing.

 The NCSC assesses that the outages are not the result of a security incident or malicious cyber activity.

What should I do?

Fixes are now available to resolve the issues, and affected organisations should refer to the relevant vendor guidance and take the necessary action.

Installing security updates is still an essential security practice and organisations should continue to install them when they are available.

Organisations should also continue to use antivirus products as normal.

Increase in phishing

Note that an increase in phishing referencing this outage has already been observed, as opportunistic malicious actors seek to take advantage of the situation.

This may be aimed at both organisations and individuals.

Organisations should review NCSC guidance to make sure that multi-layer phishing mitigations are in place, while individuals should be alert to suspicious emails or messages on this topic and know what to look for.

Individuals should be alert to suspicious emails or messages on this topic and know what to look for.

Future readiness

Incidents such as this global outage can have a huge impact on your organisation.

The NCSC’s incident response guidance is a good place to begin”

The full item can be found here: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/news/major-it-outage

Please share this within your local networks.

Guidance for the relevant areas such as Organisation and or Individuals is provided as above under “Increase in Phishing”section

Please do not report organisational cyber incidents or individual reports of Fraud / Cybercrime to your local Police Force, but via Action Fraud:

https://www.actionfraud.police.uk/reporting-fraud-and-cyber-crime

Thank you, regards, Mark