- Joined
- Sep 16, 2009
- Messages
- 19
- Reaction score
- 6
One of my elderly friends has fallen victim to a telephone call security scam.
She was told they had detected problems on her laptop - but because she had indeed been suffering from slow internet access she thought it was her service provider. After being shown all the red markers and yellow warning triangles in the event log she was suckered into downloading some software to give them access to the computer,
After several minutes demonstrating all the problems they had "found" they asked for £65 to rid it of problems, she refused to pay and put the phone down.
Today when she switched the computer on it booted to a warning screen stating that all her files had been deleted - or some such message. It does not boot to her desktop and does not respond to mouse or keyboard inputs. Fortunately she assures me she does not have any personal stuff stored on the computer or use it for banking etc. But she is distraught that she may have lost all her photos, personal correspondence to friends and family and her collection of music.
I have asked her not to switch the computer on again and I will collect it from her on Friday to see what I can do.
The question is - what can I do.
I know enough about computers to remove the hard drive from her laptop and mount it in an external enclosure to be able to look at it from a spare Win7 computer I keep for playing around with. I have no worries about infecting my spare computer with malware - I will reformat the hard drive and use Acronis to recover its hard drive from a safe back-up after I have finished playing with the infected laptop hard drive.
She was told they had detected problems on her laptop - but because she had indeed been suffering from slow internet access she thought it was her service provider. After being shown all the red markers and yellow warning triangles in the event log she was suckered into downloading some software to give them access to the computer,
After several minutes demonstrating all the problems they had "found" they asked for £65 to rid it of problems, she refused to pay and put the phone down.
Today when she switched the computer on it booted to a warning screen stating that all her files had been deleted - or some such message. It does not boot to her desktop and does not respond to mouse or keyboard inputs. Fortunately she assures me she does not have any personal stuff stored on the computer or use it for banking etc. But she is distraught that she may have lost all her photos, personal correspondence to friends and family and her collection of music.
I have asked her not to switch the computer on again and I will collect it from her on Friday to see what I can do.
The question is - what can I do.
I know enough about computers to remove the hard drive from her laptop and mount it in an external enclosure to be able to look at it from a spare Win7 computer I keep for playing around with. I have no worries about infecting my spare computer with malware - I will reformat the hard drive and use Acronis to recover its hard drive from a safe back-up after I have finished playing with the infected laptop hard drive.