Computer Repairs

Would you let a passer bye come into your house and use your phone to ring his family in China, India or Russia for an hour or two or maybe 24 hours or more when they felt like it?

On one day I had 3 customers allowing strangers to use their phone to do just that, they were not aware of it but they were doing it none the less, you may think it will never happen to you, but are you sure? you will not see this stranger, he is invisible, he can enter when ever he wants, he makes no sound has no odour but he can ring up a telephone bill for potentially more than you earn in a month in just a few days.

Have I scared you? good, be afraid, be very afraid, it could quite easily be you next, but hey, do not despair, there are things you can do to prevent it.

Ok this stranger I talk about is not a human, it is a computer program, it is invited into your computer from a website that you found, maybe on Google search engine, maybe your son visited websites that teach him about life in a rather graphic way, perhaps you received a email from a Russian ambassador offering to give you millions of dollars in a rather shifty bank transfer, however you get it it can be very expensive.

Do not despair there is a way to get around this problem and it needn’t be expensive, this hidden visitor is not a Virus as such, it is spyware, I always thought it was a trojan but names change as time goes by all the various threats all seam to cross borders as what type of the threat it is called but the fact is it is a very serious threat.

Most people now have broadband and the spyware dialler should not affect you, it may try to use your modem to dial an expensive premium rate service, but having broadband it will not succeed and not cost you anything, unless, you forget about the dial up modem and leave it connected, this was the case in 2 out of the 3 customers on the same day, the spyware set up an email account on one of the computers and could in theory dial when it wanted, as it happened it didn’t and the users telephone bill was not affected, lucky escape if you ask me.

Don’t rely on luck remove your modem cable from the telephone socket now.

On each of these sites I installed PC Tools spyware doctor, there is a free version that I could demonstrate the infections already on the customers computer, there were 128 threats on one of them, diallers as mentioned, Hijackers, and a host of other nasties.

The reason I chose PC tools is because when I was starting out in my Computer Career, when MSDOS 3.1 was new and Microsoft Windows 3.0 was a high tech interface, PC Tools were there making many of the DOS utilities easy to use and some other amazing DOS based commands, I wish I could remember what they were, I have grown up with PC Tools, I haven’t used them much since the DOS days but it has become a name I have grown to trust, there are many anti spyware programs that are in fact spyware themselves that I decided to go with a company that I knew its roots.

The installation was straight forward on each machine but there was a clash with one who was using AVG anti-virus, for a small extra charge they upgraded the spyware engine from PC tools to include anti-virus.

If you have a problem with your computer that you can not explain, perhaps you get a sales message popping up every few minutes, your phone bill is sky high or your browser keeps going to pron sites, download a free copy of this program and scan your computer, if you find any threats you can decide to buy the product and remove them or hope that you don’t get a £500 telephone bill, pray that you don’t have money moved from your bank account to an obscure Russian bank account.