Microsoft Dumps Partner For Fake Support Call Scam 212
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has broken its relationship with one of its Gold Partners, after it discovered that the partner was involved in a scam involving bogus tech support calls. India-based Comantra is said to have cold-called computer users in the UK, Australia, Canada and elsewhere, claiming to offer assistance in cleaning up virus infections. The calls used scare tactics to talk users into opening the Event Viewer on Windows, where a seemingly dangerous list of errors would be seen. This 'evidence' was used to trick innocent users into believing they had a malware infection, and for Comantra to gain the users' confidence. Duped users would then give permission for the support company to have remote access to their PC, and hand over their credit card details for a 'fix.' Security firm Sophos says that internet users have been complaining about Comantra's activities for over 18 months, and it has taken a long time for Microsoft to take action. Comantra's website still retains the Gold Certified Partner logo, although their details have been removed from Microsoft's database of approved partners."
Sophos is a security firm? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:TIB (Score:2, Interesting)
Once upon a time, I had Indian teammates working with me.
They were not rude (normally), au contraire, but their verbal politeness did not, at least on English, cope with ours. We took some time to learn how to communicate each other with (what both sides agreed it was) courtesy.
I take a even worst time with Chinese teammates over MSN conferences (we could not manage to understand our English accents! :-D). Without visual assurance, we never know for sure when we're making a praise for a job well done, or making a joke on a stupid mistake we did! X-P (even worst, sometimes what we thought was a stupid mistake was a well job done not understood at first glance).
Our texts, sometimes, were padded with "(this is a joke)" or "(this is a praise)". I remember at least one "(I still deciding if this is a joke or not)", but I don't remember who shoot that...
Looking in distance, it was hilarious. But at that time, not so much... :-)
Re:Thank you Microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
Okay, but extend that "need" into "want", and suddenly you'll find most PC gamers can't manage at all with a simplistic Chrome-like OS. If you exclude "business" users from your percentage, you'll find your target audience for a simple idiot-proof OS on home PCs dwindles significantly. Sure, they're still out there. And I wholly support giving grandma Ubuntu (or even something simplier), Firefox and Thunderbird, and letting her have at it! She doesn't need to do anything else, so anything else is just bloat. But it's not 75-80% of the home user market that applies to. I doubt it's even 50%. This is why Windows is still going strong (well, that, and the fact that it comes pre-installed on most PCs).
Most folks I know don't buy pre-made PCs, but get friends to price up and build them for them. They're "more power" machines, not "email and messenger" machines. Sure, there's still a market for K.I.S.S, but as each successive generation gets more tech-clued, folks want more options, not less. As the tablet-OS-on-desktops is beginning to take off, we may see this plateau and diverge into two markets - but I don't think you'll find the simple OS market anywhere near as high as 80% for home users - at least not for their primary PC. "Entertainment centers", sure.
So in the camp of folks who do want a more powerful, diverse OS, why WIndows instead of Linux? Linux isn't ready yet. It's at an ideal point as a Simple OS - see Grandma example above. But it's by no means ready as a replacement for Windows for the folks who want to use the additional functionality, but don't want to have to learn how to tinker with the OS. Thesedays, one should never have to see a command prompt to do ANYTHING, in normal usage. Retaining a command prompt for common usage is holding back the Linux desktop from widespread adoptance. There are too many common, complex functions in Linux, which are simple in Windows.
Agreed - there's far too much to Windows. But disagree that that fact has virtually any impact on the user. There's no aspect of the interface or interactions I have with the Windows OS that are any faster in Linux. When I finish this text and hit Preview, it won't happen faster in Linux. When I then close the browser and switch across to my Steam window, it wouldn't happen any faster in Linux. There's no distinguishable speed differential on modern-day 64-bit, 8-core PCs.
Re:Sophos is a security firm? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a reference to famous bug called the 'f00f' bug, if you've ever looked in /proc/cpuinfo on an x86 Linux system, you might have noticed it mentioned. Intel published a number of workarounds that OS vendors can use to prevent it, so most operating systems check on boot whether the system is affected, and then implement Intel's suggestions as necessary (if it says "f00f_bug: no" that means Linux determined that you were not affected, and the workarounds were not necessary).
The f00f bug was a malformed encoding of the cmpxchg8b (compare and exchange 8byte) instruction with a nonsense four byte r32 operand, however, cmpxchg8b is well known to programmers who don't specialise in security as well, as it's important for use in low-level locking primitives.
As you probably execute thousands of cmpxchg8b instructions every second, I don't know why it would look shady. Perhaps you're not a programmer and thought it looked like a random combination of digits and letters, but that would be ironic from someone called L4t3r4lu5, no? :-)