Tech support wrongness
OK. Two things to start off. Firstly, I work in the IT industry, for central government. Secondly, as what I do is rather specialised, I also take in work out of hours - to keep my hand in on some of the more obscure PC faults. In actual fact 90% of it tends to be malware infections, but there's the occasional fault that gets the grey matter ticking over.

So working for central government, there's an awful lot of absolute cretins I inhabit an office with. One of them approached me with a machine that 'needed updating'.

I forget the exact spec - I think it was something like a celeron 600 with 128 of ram, running 98SE. It was running internet explorer 5.01. This was late 2006.

Anyhoo, the updates went relatively painlessly. I clagged a NIC into the machine, joined it to my network and just downloaded the lot. I also dropped an antivirus package on there and a copy of Moz. Firefox.

When I handed the machine back, I stressed the importance of using Firefox rather than IE due to security concerns. As it's 98 there's pretty much feck all you can do to mitigate the chance of threats as you can't assign file or registry key permissions. Due to the specs of the machine and the type of usage she had, it wouldn't run 2K or XP usably, and it wasn't worth upgrading.

A month passes and she comes up to me full of hell. The phone bill has shot through the roof; she's insisting it was my fault and demands that I pay the phone bill. I agree to take the machine and diagnose exactly what happened.

Well I was on for hours. I got traces of every website she'd visited for the preceding month and cross-referenced the history with a copy of the itemised phone bill I'd taken.

The sequence of events was as follows:

30 October - I'd dropped the machine off, and had phoned home to check that the modem was working OK.
31 October - 9 November - various browsing - local estate agents, hi-fi shops, vinyl record shops, &c.
10 November - Following a browsing session from about 9:30AM - 11:45AM, the machine starts calling out on a premium rate phone number. If a DUN connection is attempted, the machine quietly drops this premium rate number. If the machine is powered up, the modem dials out.

So satisfied with the sequence of events, I ask her into a side room to discuss. I outline the above, and as I'm able to pretty much cite every website she's visited during the month it's quite obvious to her that I know exactly what was going on.

Finally, I followed up with "And how come you're not using Firefox - that browser I recommended you use for reasons of security?"

"I don't know really - I was just used to the other".

"You do realise," I continue, "that the infection you received, ten days after I'd handed the machine over to you, was only possible using Internet Explorer. If you'd followed my advice, you wouldn't be facing a £190 bill".

"Oh. What do you think I should do?"

"I'd suggest you pay the phone bill. And, here's an invoice for my time in working out what you'd done to your system."

Twunt.
(_(_(_(_(_(_(_(_(_ =o.o=, Fri 5 Sep 2008, 20:07, 1 reply)

I always find
deleting the IE icon from the desktop/start menu/quick launch bar is the best way of stopping people using IE. If they're tech-savvy enough to find iexplore.exe then they'd probably not use IE anyway...
( uberdeity Wondered why Owen Lars knew of the term "hell" on, Tue 9 Sep 2008, 11:45, closed)