Suspicious Phone Call

I had an interesting phone call the other day. A man with an indian accent, clearly from a call centre, phoned me to say there was something wrong with my computer. He said he was from Microsoft and through his help I could check the problem on my computer. Since when does Microsoft call its customers? I thought, so I was immediately suspicious, however I thought I would play along. He got me to start up the event viewer and look for warnings and errors. No matter how good your computer behaves there will always be warnings and errors in the log but usually they are not serious. He asked me how may errors I had and I lied saying there were two warnings and three errors. He kept asking me to read the errors out and look for more errors and frankly I got bored and put the phone down.

I thought no more of it until a few days later when one of my customers phoned me and was concerned about a similar phone call she had had, but it had gone further with her and they had actually remotely connected to her machine. First they got her to go to ammyy.com which provides a free program for remote desktop work, similar to teamviewer where your computer creates a client code that you give to someoneelse who then becomes and operator and takes over your desktop. A great little program but you sure as hell dont know who is connecting to your machine. Next they got her to go to a website aka-cdn-ns.adtech.de. My customer was a bit vague here but I think they might have got her to install some software, so my first thought was spyware/keylogger. She had not used her banking, social network or ebay so I was confident that her data was going to be safe but I got her to immediately check for spyware and viruses. She was only suspicious after continually asking if the person phoning her was trying to sell her something and them just fobbing her off.

If you get a similar call just put the phone down.