Greetings, I do a little IT support for an elderly neighbor (mostly fighting with her printer for her) and she recently fell for one of those fake Microsoft scams, and gave a scammer access to her laptop and hundreds of dollars worth of Nordstrom gift cards…
She’s given me the laptop as she’s afraid to open it. I’m thinking of formatting the HDs and reinstalling windows, she only uses the laptop for Internet browsing and email, so she’s not worried about losing data.
Would this be enough to undo whatever the scammer would have done on the laptop?
Any considerations or advice would be appreciated. Apologies if this isn’t an appropriate question for this forum.
Almost certainly (though not impossible). Seriously doubt they went any deeper, i.e. rootkit, UEFI firmware / BIOS compromise, etc… There are likely files (pictures, documents) that your neighbor would not want to lose on their machine though so you should figure out how to get those off first.
I’d really like if this line of work wasn’t completely doom and gloom all the time. I’m burnt out of telling people what seems like extremely dramatic, doomed scenarios of the “state of security” all the time. I feel like I’m always the asshole in the room all the time.
I’m assuming any risk management or actuary job is similar. It can be soul crushing sometimes.
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