Tasmania’s tech sector has urged businesses to get professional advice as they recover from Friday’s CrowdStrike technical incident that disrupted Tasmania’s digital economy.
General Manager TasICT Russell Kelly said that while many computer systems were returning to normal, the next wave of activity could be scammers approaching unaware businesses and pretending to help.
“After such an incident, regrettably scammers and criminals look for vulnerable targets to prey upon. 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 ICT professionals had done the State proud by minimising the effects of Friday’s CrowdStrike technical incident, checking and where required, restoring impacted services as soon as possible to minimise customer impact.
The State was on track to largely recover from the failed patch on CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor software that had affected millions of computers worldwide and disrupted some airlines, point of sale terminals, supermarkets, banking services and media bulletins, including in Tasmania.
“Every large business and Government department in Tasmania had staff monitoring all ICT services over the weekend and to roll back the failed software patch and restore business continuity where required.
“The ICT industry in Tasmania stepped up – TasICT has received reports of IT staff helping other businesses with the demand.
“No doubt the timing of Friday afternoon saved us from a much more severe outage.
“It goes to show how important the digital economy is to Tasmania, how many businesses, government services and public information services rely upon it – and why the State Government should be bringing the digital economy into the centre of its thinking.”
Mr Kelly said that the CrowdStrike technical incident mainly affected computers in business and government – with most home computers unaffected. Only computers running CrowdStrike software in conjunction with Microsoft operating systems were affected, with Apple and LINUX systems 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.”
CrowdStrike is providing regular updates through www.crowdstrike.com/blog/