Tasmanian information technology groups warns businesses of scammers in wake of outage

After the global outage Tasmanian businesses have been warned to beware of scammers. Here’s what to do to minimise the risk.

A global IT outage places internet safety under the spotlight.

As Tasmanian businesses count the cost after the “massively problematic” global outage, they have been warned to beware of scammers offering help.

TasICT general manager Russell Kelly said while many computer systems were returning to normal, the next wave of activity could be scammers approaching unaware businesses and pretending to help.

TasICT general manager Russell Kelly.

“After such an incident, regrettably scammers and criminals look for vulnerable targets to prey upon,” he said.

“The best advice is to follow the official information from CrowdStrike and contact a local ICT professional to help ensure your system is back up and running and protected from hackers at the same time.”

Mr Kelly said the outage mainly affected computers in business and government, with most home computers unaffected.

“Come Monday morning, every business and government department could use the outage as a wake-up call for how they are prioritising business resiliency and continuity and ensuring they are prepared for interruptions from events such as these,” he said.

Michael Bailey, the CEO of the Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said the outage showed Tasmania’s isolation.

While most small businesses were largely unaffected, Robert Mallett, CEO of the Small Business Council, said it highlighted the benefit of “cash and flexibility”.

Salamanca stallholder Emma Hope said many more customers were using cash at her stall on Saturday after panicking and withdrawing cash on Friday night.

Mr Bailey said the full extent of the impact on businesses would be known in the coming days and the TCCI was ready to provide support.

“It shows how reliant we are on our systems and how quickly that can unravel,” he said.

TCCI CEO Michael Bailey. Picture: Chris Kidd

“On a Friday with people coming back home or heading back out it is massively problematic for our state, we’re so reliant on connectivities.

“It also shows how behind the scenes, so much of our internet infrastructure is held together by only one or two providers.”

From a personal perspective, he said he was heading to New Zealand on a trade mission on Tuesday and had initially wondered if the outage would be resolved before then.

Mr Mallett said no small businesses had complained to him about the outage.

“We operated as per normal, the only issue would have been if your bank or whatever, couldn’t take credit cards,” he said.

“It shows the benefit of cash and flexibility and I think it just demonstrates the capacity of smaller businesses to be nimble, flexible, and accept cash.

“Cash is not dead, as much as the banks would like to kill it because to them, they say it’s expensive.”

Mr Mallet said governments needed to mandate “that cash will never go out” and always would be available at a fair price.

Ms Hope said cash sales at her stall usually amounted to between 10 and 20 per cent of her sales but on Saturday more than half paid with cash.

“A lot of people said ‘I’ve got all this cash because I got it out last night’. They went into a panic because they didn’t know how long the outage was going to last and they didn’t know which shops would accept cash or cards.”

Some stallholders were missing from Salamanca on Saturday but Ms Hope was unsure if that was due to the outage.

CrowdStrike is providing regular updates through www.crowdstrike.com/blog/

Originally published as Tasmanian information technology groups warns businesses of scammers in wake of outage