(no subject)

[girlofprey]

So. At the end of a week that got very dark in certain places, I came home to find out my mum had accidentally let hackers onto my dad's computer, while he was away in London doing an assessment to finally try to get chartered, which he said went shit. My oldest nephew scared me by showing just how much like his mother he is, refusing to take any blame for the hack whatsoever, even though it was a site he went on that caused the problem. And the light in the garage has gone.

My nephew was trying to go onto a site he usually goes on, and got a message saying the computer had been hacked and to call a particular number. My mum saw it, tried to call my dad but he didn't answer, and then tried to call me but my phone had died. I was literally just thinking today "I should give them my work number, in case they ever need to contact me and my phone dies again", but ah well. So in a panic she called the number. I have no idea what she did, but she did a couple of things they told her to do, like holding down the Windows button and r, and inputting a command. Then they tried to get her to pay for something, and she decided to stop it there, she wasn't comfortable doing that. Then she left the computer on for a while, while called my sister, and then called my dad again, who told her to switch it off.

I have no idea if they could access my computer through my dad's computer, but I tried googling it and nothing really came up, and I realised I would probably suddenly know if they could or they couldn't without using a computer anyway. Hopefully they can't. If anyone out there knows for sure, I would appreciate being told. In the meantime, I've run a virus scan on my computer which has come up clean, and if any of you receive weird emails from me, I'm sorry. And please let me know.

Comments

[jekesta]

Oh no, that's awful. I have no idea how much stuff people can get to doing things like that. I hope not much, obviously.

I have pages come up sometimes when I'm downloading stuff, and they're awful with a voice message playing about how windows is corrupted and you will lose all your data if you do not call microsoft now on this number right now your computer is in serious danger fire death... and sometimes they make it so I can't close that tab and I have to close all of firefox to get rid of it and I always think about how much that would freak my mum out.

[girlofprey.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's pretty much what happened to my mum. She was not happy about it, and my nephew now doesn't understand why maybe he's not old enough to be just clicking whatever he wants with a really, really expensive PC. My dad has done a virus scan and not found anything though, so we now think it's just one of those scams where they try to sell you things, 'amazing virus protection' or whatever. I'm still not convinced they couldn't have accessed the system and gotten something out of it, since we weren't prepared to pay them, but there you go. My dad's virus protection says no, and he does have an incredibly expensive, up-to-date programme for it.

To be fair, she did try to call everyone she could think of to ask about it. We were just not reachable - it was extremely bad timing. I've told her in future to just get our tablet and google whatever it says onscreen along with the word 'scam' - it should tell her pretty quickly when things are not legit.