061: Phony Tech Support
/Recorded live on July 29, 2014
- one of Joe's clients fell for a popup window claiming virus infection and imploring her to call phony tech support, who proceeded to run harmless utilities (ping test, CPU History, netstat, top) and claiming they were evidence of malware; paid $300 for two years of support from "Mac"; Joe removed LogMeIn, TeamViewer, and ran a full scan using Sophos Antivirus and removed 8 instances of malware
- Sam's wife received a call from phony tech support; thankfully she proceeded to interrogate the guy about his badge number, company, and credentials until he hung up
- Social Engineering techniques on the rise, demonstrated in this scene from Hackers
- Network World reports: FTC takes out “tech support” scammers; $5.1 million in fines, retribution
- Jerry reminds us to manually remove updates downloaded by Software Update service when no longer needed!
- Joe recovered data from client ZIP disk, wrote AppleScript to convert old Word documents
- xkcd: Automation
- Joe discovered issue with Time Machine failing to complete a backup, with no error messages displayed, due to nesting of folders too deeply: "destination path too long"; not sure how long is too long, but in this case is was over 50 levels deep