I spent an exciting twenty minutes on the telephone this morning with a guy claiming to know my computer had all sorts of malware on it, that hackers had taken control of it, and it was generally full of bad juju (my words, not his).
I spent the time because I wanted to see where this all went and how good he was (I was also bored). I acted dumb, and never told him I have a doctorate in computer science and did computer security.
The call came from a “Private Number” with no caller ID to my home phone. I never really understood the caller’s name; he had a very pronounced Indian/Pakistani accent and always mumbled when saying his name. For simplicity, I will call him Tabaqui (before you look it up, Tabaqui is the jackal in The Jungle Book who ate scraps the other animals left).
Tabaqui claimed to be from Microsoft’s outsourced computer security support center, and that the Microsoft security server had been getting all sorts of malware alerts from my computer. He was calling because the malware on my computer would intercept any corrections they sent, so he was calling to put this right in person.