Warning Telephone Scam

Hi People

The title says it all really.

About a month ago, a lady rang me saying that she had had a telephone call from 'Microsoft' saying that they ('Microsoft') had noticed that her computer was suffering from corrupt files and spyware.  She put them off and called me.  I told her that it was a scam and she breathed a sigh of relief.

  I thought nothing more of it,until a couple of days ago, another lady rang me saying the exact same thing, only this time she followed their instructions

First of all, she asked them why she should believe them, so they asked her to go to a website to 'prove' they were genuine and mentioned again that they were 'Microsoft Partners' (I believe they may have ripped off someone's site and presented it with a new domain name (the www address ).
Being convinced that they were who they said they were, she allowed them to access her computer remotely.

Needless to say, they must have put something on the computer as directly they had finished, they told her that her PC was indeed infected and that for XX sum of money, per 3 months she could have her computer kept clean. 

She twigged at this point (but the damage had already been done), and told them that she had not agreed to pay any money.  

To which they said well if you dont have it done your computer will close down in six hours.

*  NOTE Microsoft DO NOT ring you unless you have contacted them first to arrange a support call *

Do not take phone calls from Microsoft Partners.

This was the point at which I was called in to remedy the situation



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Why would someone want my computer?

Hi People

Whilst seeing a number of clients recently, a very similar question was asked, by several of them. The question was a one of why.  

Why would someone want my computer, I don't store anything on it? Or why do they do it (electronically vandalise computers)?

Whilst, if you think that derranged electronic nerds may be after your bank account, or credit card details, there are other reason why they would want to access your computer.  Consider the following:

1. Your system is a fully functioning PC with a link to the internet.
2. You have details which are personal, and these a probably stored on your PC, and I am not talking about bank, credit card or passwords.  Here the point is your email address book and other contacts, photos and letters etc.
3. Business quotes, and supplier details

Right let's have a look at these one by one (and I sure I have missed some other reasons).

1) Having a fully functioning PC connected to the internet, means it can be controlled remotely by a third party (with the right software present - legitimate or illegitimate).   It could then become part of a large network of computers all controlled by this one piece of software (read one person or perhaps a group of people). 

Now these people may want to extort money from a company or individual (read target), by getting all the remotely controlled computers, to send a request of some sort (or even an email) to the target and with such a lot of requests the servers may not cope and they go offline.  Which means the target cannot do business online. 

Your PC could well be part of this and you wouldn't know it.  These are called botnets

2) Email addresses, a possible source of infection for your friends, colleagues, associates, and business suppliers.

If there are letters of a personal nature, and or pictures then the third party can start a personal identity theft file on you.

3) Businesses losing out to competitors, time and time again, (industrial espionage) could possibly be a trojan or other piece of malware  sending back information on your business activities, or indeed on the whole business structure.

Think about it, your PC is worth a bundle to 'them' out there on the internet.

Get some internet security, but wait don't just rely on that, get at least two good antispyware packages (free ones, for personal use), update often them and use them regularly and OFTEN (not just once a month or two weeks).  Go to www.gds888.com and find a link to two good antispyware products in the free software section.

Go on Do IT Now before you forget.

See you next time

Prometheus1618

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USB drives, RAM disks and memory cards

Don't Rely on USB drives (pen drives, memory sticks, USB sticks or whatever you want to call them), RAM disks (DVD RAM), OR memory cards (SD, MMC, xD etc.) for data.

Yes I mean it, do not rely on them for 'permanent storage' i.e backing up, or worse still the only copy of your data.  Use them for temporary storage only, and what I mean by that is, if you are using any of the above for data storage make sure you have other copies stored on DVDs (not DVD RAM), or an external hard drive.

Let me tell you of my experiences with these storage products.

DVD RAM:

I used to use this for my website amongst, so I could update on any of my systems, this turned out to be a mistake that cost me.  The disk was new and after a few dozen read/write cycles, I noticed something really weird, certain folders were losing the data and one of the folders was the site content!  The disk appeared to have lost the contents of the level two / three folders but not the folders themselves.  The level one folders (those in the root of the disk) were OK, very strange.  So, now I will not entrust permanent storage tasks to DVD-RAM (unless I have several other copies elsewhere- and yes I know I should be backing up regularly and that I had, so I got the latest backup and used what I wanted from that - it was a hard drive backup by the way).

USB pen drive

This was a near total disaster for my other half, she has been using a pen drive to store a growing amount of knowledge on a favourite subject of hers.  It was being accumulated on a daily basis, at her place of work and at home, hence the use of something small (not too small to go unnoticed) and portable, that could be used on virtually any current system (by the way when Microsoft Office was not available, then OpenOffice.org was - set to read and write MS Office documents and spreadsheets).  One evening, after work (she had used the pen drive at the office), she plugged the pen drive into her laptop, with no response at all from the drive.  The follow days were fill with methodical attempts to recover the data, to no avail (a situation I found was a common situation, on internet forums).  So whilst it was an unfortunate situation, the sources of all the work were still available and she went to work rebuilding her notes - on a hard drive in one place only).

SD card

Now I am making assumptions here, that memory card storage in general has the same characteristics, whilst the method of accessing will vary hence the various types of card, e.g. xD, SD, MMC,  Duo, etc.  Also the type of storage gate may differ (currently I am not sure whether SD memory uses a NAND gate for storage or not)

This situation was very similar to the one with the DVD-RAM, in that data was stored and frequently used on an SD card.  On accessing the card recently the card showed very similar characteristics to the DVD-RAM situation above, in that some of the deeper folders (level 2 and 3) had lost their data, but not the folders i.e. the folders were empty!.  Fortunately the data in level one folders was available and ok.   Again a backup provided what I needed.  Phew! I am thankful for backups.

A further point to note here was the weather at the time of the failures was hot and humid. Now this may be a coincidence, but it makes me wonder.

Any way, that's it for this post

See you people
Prometheus1618


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