Bogus telephone software support

Bogus telephone software support is now reaching epidemic proportions in Ireland. the scam goes like this. You receive a telephone call to say you need to maintenance on your PC and that the caller will do this for you. All you need do is to download software from this site and they will control your PC and "fix" it. What actually happens ?

The "fixer" logs onto your PC runs some software.

This has the effect of letting a complete stranger sit at your keyboard and do what they want.

There are a whole range of serious things that can happen,

• one is identity theft, credit card skimming,
• key stroke recording for secure banking sites,
• placing of trojans on your pc to make it an attacking pc once it connects to the internet. 

 

We had one such "fixing company call the office and decided to let them onto a "honey pot" machine. Their number was blocked but we kept talking to them pretending to be "taken in". We asked them for their address, looked it up on daft.ie and it turned out to be a vacant building in Earl Street in Dublin.

We asked them for their company number, and they gave their phone number instead. Interesting. At this point they thought they were covered.

We then let them access the "honey pot" off the network and on a standalone mobile broad band connection. They installed a registry cleaner, brought up email clients looking for email, proceeded to set some setting in the browser to allow cookies and scripts to run.Then when done installed a few trojans, and told us the machine would work much quicker and better now. The final act was to turn off auto updates from microsoft.

We traced their IP address to an internet call shop in Dublin.  We then ended the call and ran our virus checking software on the pc, we had found the "honey pot" was so badly infected the pc had to be re built. Their trojan had disabled all virus checking and updates onto the PC and was starting to spam messages 10 minutes after.  

Very amateurish attack by technical standards, but one that most non tech-savy users would fall for. Interestingly they were using the information from legitimate services to appear as a bone fide business. 

Never let any cold caller access your PC remotely ever, no matter how dire or important the update they have for you.

Tell them you have a it provider who looks after your PC's and you'll call them right away to sort out this issue. Then put th phone down, do not let them bully you into thinking the world will end if you do not take this update now.