Over the past number of weeks I have become increasingly aware of the dangers of giving people access to your computer. With particular reference to the people who are phoning computer owners claiming to be from Microsoft and telling them that there is some problem with their computer, if this has happened to you or anyone you know, let me paint a picture for you.
A person knocks on a mans door and tells him there is something wrong with his house, he asks the house owner to let him in and he goes around the house pointing out a fault here and a fault there, he then sells him some glue to fix the problem and he goes away. But what the house owner does not know is during the time that he was showing the person around the house, the person had stolen a set of keys to the house, which when he left gave him access to the house at all times., and whenever he needed to use the house he did. The house owner was tormented by this intruder because he did not know when he would come back and what he would do when he did.
I believe in free choice so I am not telling people what to do but instead I would like to tell you what I would do in this circumstances. Firstly disconnect the computer from the Internet immediately, now, don’t wait to finish reading. secondly remove and replace the hard disk in the computer, thirdly change all my passwords, every single one of them, bank access codes etc. I would not touch the old hard disk until I knew that the files that were inserted onto my computer to make it operate as part of a botnet have been identified and removed with total certainty.
I have worked on infected computers for less than the minimum wage per hour to detect and remove these, it takes many man(woman) hours. It can be likened to a criminal investigation, where you know something is there and it has to be tracked down and removed.
I do not wish to be alarmist, but if you have been contacted by one of these cyber criminals, you have not got away with it and it needs to be removed anti virus is not enough as these were individually placed on a computer, otherwise you might find your computer is part of a botnet, which is if you would like to know a network of ordinary people’s computers that have been silently hijacked to work for criminal organisations.
