This morning i had a call on my mobile from a number in new york – i picked up because i thought it was a friend who was calling. I was quite surprised to hear an indian woman on the other side of the phone. The conversation went along these lines.
Caller: Hello I am from Microsoft technical support. I am calling because i understand you have a problem wih your computer – it contain viruses and is running slow.
Me: oh gosh, no viruses? what do i do….
Caller: Go to your pc and switch it on. Find the Ctrl key… and press Ctrl + R and tell me what comes up on the screen.
…at this point i hung up. i would have played along a little further but i couldn’t be assed to actually boot up a pc, no matter how interested i was in what she was trying to get me to do. I wasn’t about to let her know i was running on a mac either. Its the first time anyone has actually phoned me trying to give me information to allow them go gain access to my PC.
I say this now to my less techy friends – Microsoft doesn’t just call you up to offer you technical support out of the blue and its a bad idea to do anything on your computer that a random caller asks for. I am shocked by this behaviour but really do not know what to do - Ive no idea where they got my phone number from, or who i would report such things to. I am sure there are people out there that do get caught out by this kind of con – it makes me fairly angry, and want to do something about it, actually knowing that theres a person out there – a seemingly harmless indian woman who is willing to help someone hack me – it makes it personal, and offensive – that someone i don’t know wants to cause me harm. Social engineering – actually doing what someone tells you is probably the easiest pay off for a hacker – rather than try to compromise your systems they actually manipulate you into giving key information – be it an actual password or tricking you into installing “diagnostics” software.
There are bastards out there. Be careful!
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