Staying Alert: How Cybercriminals Exploit Major Tech Outages
When major cloud services experience downtime, cybercriminals are quick to capitalize on the confusion and urgency. Recent high-profile outages of services like AWS have demonstrated how threat actors leverage these disruptions to launch convincing phishing campaigns targeting both businesses and consumers.
Why Security Teams Need to Stay Vigilant
During service outages, employees are more likely to let their guard down when receiving seemingly urgent communications about service restoration, account verification, or data recovery. The chaos and business impact of downtime creates perfect conditions for social engineering attacks. Security teams must be prepared to identify and respond to these opportunistic threats.
Building Resilience Through Security Awareness
This is where KnowBe4 security awareness training becomes essential. Their platform helps organizations:
- Train employees to recognize phishing attempts that exploit major outages
- Run simulated phishing campaigns to test readiness
- Deploy just-in-time training when real incidents occur
- Track and measure security awareness improvements
Protecting Your Organization
Security leaders can take several steps to strengthen defenses:
- Brief teams on how attackers exploit outage situations
- Review incident response plans for concurrent outage/phishing scenarios
- Deploy enhanced email security controls
- Establish clear communication channels for outage updates
Is your organization prepared to detect and respond to opportunistic phishing campaigns during the next major service disruption? Contact us to learn how KnowBe4's security awareness platform can help build a more resilient security culture.
