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Where's Mouse When You Need Him?
Nov. 17th, 2013 11:51 amPooh Bear has been banned from the internet. If you haven't been following along, Pooh Bear is my PC laptop. It's a crappy Toshiba that I bought because I liked the way the keyboard clacked and it was amazingly cheap. I'm not normally a high end user, you see. Novels, no matter how sprawling, just don't take up that much space. So, I've never needed anything fancy. Except.... Pooh, I mean... so sad.
Yesterday we got a call from someone claiming to be from Microsoft who wanted to tell us the Pooh has been hosting hackers. I say claiming because, even if the guy *was* legit, what he wanted was to sell us a cleaning service. Things were going along swimmingly until he started talking prices (in excess of a hundred dollars) at which point I said, "No, thanks. If things are really that bad, I'll just take Pooh to Chip Heads or one of those places and just wipe him clean and reinstall everything." The guy on the other end of the phone tried to convinced me that wouldn't work, that the problem was, "with my network."
This was where I got suspicious because we connect to the internet via our wifi hotspot. We don't have a router or cable or anything tangible, not really, and even if we did that still didn't make sense to me. I asked him to explain what he meant. He'd been saying all sorts of Microsoft programs were turned off, which I could believe, but I had no idea how this could have somehow corrupted anything outside of Pooh himself. The wifi doesn't run any programs independently and certainly doesn't run on Microsoft. He tried to tell my other computers would be infected, to which I said, "Not if it's a Microsoft issue, because they're all Macs and or Apples, iTouch and iPads. The only other computer in the house has to dial-up."
Then he told me that I was "too smart for him" and hung up.
I think so. Or too stubborn. Regardless, I told him that I might be a moron in terms of my protection of my PC, but I'm not so much an idiot that I would give my credit card information to anyone, even Bill Gates himself, OVER THE PHONE.
However, it seems very, very clear to me that Pooh has been hacked to the highest degree. So, I disabled Pooh's wifi connection immediately and am now attempting to move all my information over to the Mac that I got as part of the Unseen World project. Also, as a precaution, I changed every single password I had stored on that computer.
The only problem continues to be user error. I've been trying to download Skype to the Mac and I'll be damned if I didn't completely mess up changing my password (twice) and now I have to wait twenty-four hours before trying again. This is only a bummer because I use Skype a lot for its text function. But, it's not the end of the world. At least I have another computer to run this stuff off.
Here's where I wish I were Mouse from my books.
Anyway, I've got to run because I'm working for Sofa Wolf today, finishing up some of the kickstarter work I've been doing for them.
Yesterday we got a call from someone claiming to be from Microsoft who wanted to tell us the Pooh has been hosting hackers. I say claiming because, even if the guy *was* legit, what he wanted was to sell us a cleaning service. Things were going along swimmingly until he started talking prices (in excess of a hundred dollars) at which point I said, "No, thanks. If things are really that bad, I'll just take Pooh to Chip Heads or one of those places and just wipe him clean and reinstall everything." The guy on the other end of the phone tried to convinced me that wouldn't work, that the problem was, "with my network."
This was where I got suspicious because we connect to the internet via our wifi hotspot. We don't have a router or cable or anything tangible, not really, and even if we did that still didn't make sense to me. I asked him to explain what he meant. He'd been saying all sorts of Microsoft programs were turned off, which I could believe, but I had no idea how this could have somehow corrupted anything outside of Pooh himself. The wifi doesn't run any programs independently and certainly doesn't run on Microsoft. He tried to tell my other computers would be infected, to which I said, "Not if it's a Microsoft issue, because they're all Macs and or Apples, iTouch and iPads. The only other computer in the house has to dial-up."
Then he told me that I was "too smart for him" and hung up.
I think so. Or too stubborn. Regardless, I told him that I might be a moron in terms of my protection of my PC, but I'm not so much an idiot that I would give my credit card information to anyone, even Bill Gates himself, OVER THE PHONE.
However, it seems very, very clear to me that Pooh has been hacked to the highest degree. So, I disabled Pooh's wifi connection immediately and am now attempting to move all my information over to the Mac that I got as part of the Unseen World project. Also, as a precaution, I changed every single password I had stored on that computer.
The only problem continues to be user error. I've been trying to download Skype to the Mac and I'll be damned if I didn't completely mess up changing my password (twice) and now I have to wait twenty-four hours before trying again. This is only a bummer because I use Skype a lot for its text function. But, it's not the end of the world. At least I have another computer to run this stuff off.
Here's where I wish I were Mouse from my books.
Anyway, I've got to run because I'm working for Sofa Wolf today, finishing up some of the kickstarter work I've been doing for them.
