Gone Phishing

Three hours of my life have been consumed today as a result of 1) a fake website 2) an elderly relative asking to be called by this website and 3) said elderly relative allowing persons unknown to take control of his PC to fix "26 infected drivers"

My elderly relative loves a "bargin". He frequently peruses Ebay for stuff that he thinks he needs, yet will be in a box in a car boot one day. There is no harm in that to be fair, it keeps his mind active and he enjoys it. His latest purchase was a Garmin satnav (he still drives, just). This satnav being secondhand was a bit out of date - confusion reigned when it reckoned he was driving through a field last week and so he decided he needed to contact Garmin to see what could be done about it. A quick search on his PC brought him to a website convincingly (to him) owned by Garmin with a help section where all he needed to do was to enter his phone number for the "support engineer" to call him.

He was called by a very helpful chap going by the name of "Doug". After being directed to go to a site and run a bit of software, Doug was onto his PC and started about his business updating the satnav. However much to my elderly relatives dismay, Doug could not (after a few minutes trying) update his satnav. The PC had 26 infected drivers no less and until this issue was resolved the satnav would not work.

Four days later it dawned on said elderly relative that young Gavin (he's old remember :) ) "works in computers" and that he should call me.

Three hours later with the help of a legitimate remote control app, flaky broadband at said relatives house, many reboots and Malwarebytes I finally wrestled control of the PC away from the dark side of the IT world.

And ten minutes later had the satnav updated.

I then explained some do's and don'ts in elderly IT speak about how to spot the good guys from the bad guys and to set about changing every password he was using.

In his defence he said he thought it would be OK as a "guy from BT" had taken control of his PC a few weeks earlier to fix another problem. I explained that he most certainly wasn't from BT....