Greybytes.net - Cold Caller

Grudaire

Just thought I'd post up about a call I got today on the house phone, mainly to warn people, or on the very very very off-chance it was genuine!

Basically I was an Asian sounding caller who rang about the fact that our PC was infected with malware and lots of virus's, blah blah blah. They knew the PC owners name, and the operating system (Vista).

Anyway Ricky Williams here claims to be working for http://greybytes.net/ , so anyway I open up the PC, and my own which is on Linux so I'm not as worried about visiting anywhere) first he gets me to run eventvw (which Microsoft.com told me is a genuine tool to view 'events' in the PC)

Anyway under security in there there are several error and warning events (well around a hundred out of a few thousand events). So then he tries to get me to go on http://www.ammyy.com/en/ . Having had my fun I told him to take a hike.

Anyway an interesting article of something similar over in Auzzieland http://www.stuff.co.nz/marlborough-express/news/4164335/Scammers-seek-computer-control

And Here Comreg get the number that is still on the website blocked: http://www.comreg.ie/_fileupload/File/323_Case_Summary%5B1%5D(1).pdf

Anyway - anything similar happen to anyone else!?

jakedixon2004

This is a scam and they are attempting to install a RAT ( Remote Access Tool ) on your PC. I have no idea how they are getting the name and OS of the computer, but be very careful when it comes to this sort of stuff. One wrong click and they have complete access to your machine.

Grudaire

Out of curiosity why would they want the remote access?

Personal info or Malware (DDOS Attacks?)

jakedixon2004

Well, if they were feeling particularly malicious, then they could remotely install a trojan by the name of Zeus which will gather up all of your paypal/banking/credit card info and send it back to them.
They could also just go through your computer to see what you have been viewing for market research or just install a DDoS bot as you already stated.

Philcan

Something similiar happened to my Mother today. She got a phonecall from an Asian sounding girl who warned her that her laptop had viruses in it. She said that they were a security company based in Limerick. They knew her name and address. She was asked to do something on her laptop but not being very computer saavy couldn't understand what she was being asked to do. So she said she would call her son (me) and asked them to call her back later.

She rang me and I told her not to do anything that they asked should they ring back and told her to ask for the name of their company and a phone number.

She got a call back around 15 minutes later. They claimed to be a company based in Limerick (I can't remember the name now, OSC or something like that) and gave her a phone number with an 061 prefix. I rang the number and got connected to Skype.

No harm done this time thankfully.

Grudaire

Yeah Skype seems to be their choice of phone system, Comreg had skype disable the number greybytes provided before.

I can easily imagine a LOT of people getting taken in by this ruse....