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posted by Fnord666 on Friday January 10 2020, @10:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the this-is-windows-calling-to-inform-you dept.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/01/paul-krugmans-no-good-very-bad-internet-day/

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, professor at the City University of New York, and New York Times columnist, experienced a chain of what appear to be Internet scam mishaps based on posts to Twitter that he later deleted.

[...]it appears that Krugman finally realized it was a scam—with the New York Times security team responding to assist him.

[...]It's not clear whether the call to Krugman was a targeted scam or if he was simply the target of an arbitrary robocall scam similar to those Ars has reported on in the past (and this reporter has received three calls from in the last two days).

Despite his field expertise, Krugman is a prime candidate for such attacks, given his public presence and previously demonstrated unease with technology.

[...]So it's critical that people with some technical know-how and experience educate family members and people in their communities about these types of criminal activity. Tell them that they should not click on that link in an email or a Facebook message, that Windows will not call them, and show them the Federal Trade Commission website report on phone scams.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday January 10 2020, @12:34PM (2 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Friday January 10 2020, @12:34PM (#941841) Journal

    I have never been fooled by a direct call from "Windows technical support", or a phishing email I received. But I was fooled by others' confusion. A contact of my mother's passed on a prank email that claimed a legit system file was actually a virus and should be deleted immediately. She obviously believed it, and at first, I almost believed them. Besides, merely deleting one file that wasn't crucial to system operation wasn't going to be a problem. Delete first, and check later. When I learned a few minutes later that it was a legit file, I restored it.

    Another time, my father called me in to help with a screen that told him he'd been logged out of gmail and needed to log in again. I thought he'd forgotten his password again, and that he really had been logged out for inactivity or something. Those screens were pretty common. And I was in a hurry.

    Just after I entered the password, I realized my mistake. I rushed to change his password. The scumbag phishers still got off several spam emails to his contact list in the half a minute it took to change the password. He wanted to do a very weak change, just increment the last digit in his password. I didn't think that would be good enough, but gave it a try. It wasn't. Mere minutes later, a few more spam emails were sent from his account, and I got him to change to a completely different password. That stopped them.

    I wonder a few things about that incident. Why didn't the perps' system immediately change the password and lock him out of his own account? Maybe download his saved emails, delete them off the webmail service, and demand a ransom for their restoration? Surely they must have at the least harvested his contact list? But it seems they didn't even do that. Could it be that their system can't do that stuff automatically, and needs a human to finish the job once the automatics have snagged a password? In which case, maybe I did act too fast for them.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @01:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @01:44PM (#941861)

    Most users won't notice. If you change the password, they'll start getting error messages and may shut down the account. Changing the password from a new IP address may also trigger an intrusion detection flag. In contrast, just allowing it to keep working and sending spam in the background means that they may have a working spam machine for a long time.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by khallow on Friday January 10 2020, @01:53PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 10 2020, @01:53PM (#941863) Journal

    Why didn't the perps' system immediately change the password and lock him out of his own account?

    A lot of this stuff works because it flies beneath the radar. If the email provider suddenly receives thousands of password lost requests that require the costly services of a human to unravel, you can be sure they'll put in place anti-spam procedures and filters that would make this a higher cost operation for the spammer. By operating in this way, the spammer can keep their scheme running longer without modification.