Users of Windows OS beware

Guys I have just spent hours with my 85 year old father trying unsuccessfully to get his computer back up and running after an extremely malicious cyber attack from some scumbags with Indian accents.

Here's what happened:
On Thursday last week my father powered up his laptop that runs Windows 7 and he had a "pop-up" appear on the screen telling him that "some drivers require updating" and to telephone an 0800 phone number. As an elderly person who trusts everything that comes up on his computer implicitly he called the number............. the Indian person answered and talking him through some steps on his laptop which seem to have downloaded some program that allowed this person to access and manipulate the laptop remotely........... then said Indian person demanded £29-99 to fix the problem accepting payment by credit card. Well I think you might know what happened next - no OS, computer just went into a loop on restart and couldn't be re-opened when my father declined to give the card details - the scammer had deleted a whole load of files from the laptop for not getting the money.

This morning the local computer tech has spent 3 hours getting the computer back up and running and also sorting my father's Kindle which had also been subject to a similar attack. What is annoying is the computer tech told us he had been to fix at least a dozen PC's and Laptops in the last week locally that have been subjected to the same malicious attacks. Everyone of them belongs to an older person who has assumed that the pop-up is a genuine Microsoft warning and learned to their cost that it is a scam. Fortunately when we contacted my Dad's banks, Building Society and credit card providers they all acted immediately to block any access to his accounts unless he is there in person. Barclaycard even refunded the £29-99 taken from his account and have liased with the police to investigate the account that took the money - this account is based in Florida!

So folks, if you get a mystery pop-up appearing on your PC/Laptop/Windows OS based tablet PLEASE do not call the freephone number as you are going to suffer some form of cyber attack on your system.

Now to help everybody here, does anybody know what precautions can be taken for the future to prevent further attacks like this - interestingly as soon as the computer tech got Dad's laptop up and running again my Dad got a phone call from the scamming Indian..................... he wisely hung up immediately so they have some way of monitoring you system even after you have got it up and running.

Decent firewall and anti virus, Kasperski or similar and don't rely on the free ones like AVG, they are just not good enough.

Windows 7 and 8 leave all sorts of ports open and scammers can manipulate random PCs based on random IP addresses very easily so do not underestimate the value the £35 AV and firewall.

Microsoft Security Essentials is worth installing and free from Microsoft... frankly should be built into the operating system! But guess then it could be classed as a monopoly out-doing the competition.

Or Avast... is also good and free, but will try to upsell itself, but is probably better than MSE.

Avast is also available on Kindle along with Sheild

this works the other way too...

My mum got a "random" phone call (I guess she is on a suckers list somewhere), they claimed to be from microsoft, and is she having problems with the speed of her computer.
She is having problems as her computer is 10 years old, so she said yes... so they asked her to download a screensharing program, which she did, and they opened the event viewer which is always full of warnings (even on a healthy pc), and told her that was the problem, and if she downloaded this program it would fix it all.

Now luckily, my mums computer is that crap, that after 10 minutes of downloading, it timed out and the computer froze when the 'microsoft' person asked why the connection had been cut, my mum said it was normal and she'd just restart it now, they hung up.

She then phoned me, who, after ranting at being so stupid and why would microsoft phone her randomly to ask if everything was ok, had to remote in myself and clean up all the semi-downloaded software.
I properly told her off and said if ever a website says do you want to...?, then the answer is no, and if anyone randomly phones... the answer is no.
jeez.

anyway, lesson learnt, but yes, people need to be vigilant these days, it only takes one person like my mum or tim's dad to make these scams worthwhile

(13-03-2014 12:48pm)XFullFatTim Wrote:  Now to help everybody here, does anybody know what precautions can be taken for the future to prevent further attacks like this - interestingly as soon as the computer tech got Dad's laptop up and running again my Dad got a phone call from the scamming Indian..................... he wisely hung up immediately so they have some way of monitoring you system even after you have got it up and running.

If the machine has been completely rebuilt then they wont know about it. What they do have is his phone number and the fact that they have trashed his machine. they know it will get rebuilt so just call again a few days later

He's had so many tellings offs for opening email attachments for wonderful offers and advising him that he has a tax refund etc etc that after this episode he has hopefully seen just how easy it is to have your bank/ credit card etc etc cleaned out for believing everything that comes up on the computer screen. He used to be very savvy about all these things but anno domini is catching up on him and he is of an age group who cannot understand why people would want to to steal information / money from him.
He's just had an email from BT advising him of some download they recommend....... so he phoned BT and asked for technical help........ what did they do but connect him through to a call centre in India where an Indian man wanted to help out............ this one was genuine but he is sufficiently wary that he just hung up!

I get the phone calls often, as does my mother. My response now is to tell them just a minute and I put the phone down, still connected, and get on with what ever I am doing. Got my mum well trained to do similar.

(14-03-2014 09:04am)Mark^^ Wrote:  I get the phone calls often, as does my mother. My response now is to tell them just a minute and I put the phone down, still connected, and get on with what ever I am doing. Got my mum well trained to do similar.

+ 1
We actually put the phone on speaker and place it next to the parrot's cage. The conversation between an Indian call centre and a parrot has to be heard to be belived!!

That's cruelty to parrots!

(14-03-2014 03:00pm)XFullFatTim Wrote:  That's cruelty to parrots!

Tim, the other way round, you have not met our parrot especially when she is in a bad mood!