Microsoft Windows just called me now at 8PM on a Sunday night to let me know about the terrible vulnerability of my system. I asked which one (since I run many) to which he replied all of them. I of course, being such a heavy user of the systems as part of my livelihood, was gravely concerned so I spent fifteen minutes wasting his time. See - he cant reach my systems to remote in because my gateway device is firewalled as is my host operating system (and the others running virtually as guests in the sandbox environment of my setup here at home). When I got bored of him I told him well since you cannot get in to review my system remotely I am pretty confident that neither can an attacker. He then warned me that the vulnerabilities were very critical and that I should address them. So I gave him the host name of one of my virtual machines, the MAC address, the IP address, as well as the administrator account and password. He still couldnt gain access to the system (but I was running the NIC on the VM in promiscuous mode so I COULD see his machine connection attempts). Despite all that, he continued to warn me that only their service could restore my systems to the correct running order. I then rattled off HIS MAC address and IP address of his system and its failed attempts to get into my system. I told him as soon as I finished my TRACERT back I could let him know what the trouble was on his end. Strangely, the connection attempts to my system stopped and the phone went dead.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 00:34:14 +0000