Andy Burgin

In November of 2017, I got to go to a conference called DevOps Enterprise Summit in San Francisco. I hear it's good. And that was over in San Francisco, America-shire. In November, the locals were getting very excited about this thing called Thanksgiving, and being British, I have no idea what it is.

But I understand it's a big deal, and even though a few locals explained it, I'm still confused. But I understand there's lots of traveling, going visiting friends and families. And it reminded me that when I see my friends and family for extended breaks, I have this superpower unlocked because I'm a techie.

And it doesn't really matter what kind of techie you are, whether you're a dev, an op, CIO, CTO, even an architect. You have a superpower unlocked around your friends and family because at some point during your visit, one of your loved ones will say, "Ooh, while you're here, would you have a look at the computer? It's running a bit slow."

And I have lost countless Boxing Day afternoons running virus scanners, anti-malware, and the never-ending Windows updates on a Dell XP laptop full of bloatware.

I know, it's awful. But good news. We don't have to do that anymore. There are some people out there who would very much like to help your friends and family with their computer problems. There's a catch. They're scammers. They might nick passwords, credit cards, install ransomware.

And I understand they'll just phone you out of the blue pretending to be Windows Support. And I thought, "If I ever got phoned by one of these, I might just wind them up because while I'm doing that, one, it'll be funny, two, they won't be scamming real people." And I got phoned by one of them last summer.

The phone rang, I answered it. He says, "Is that Mr. Burgin?" I said, "Yes." He said, "This is Windows Support, and our systems have detected your PC is under attack."

I said, "Right, okay. What can we do about that?" Now, at this point, I'm in a complex three-layer attack. I don't realize it at the time. The first guy is trying to get me to believe I've got a problem.

So he says, "Can we run through some basic diagnostics?" I say, "Yeah, sure." He says, "Are you at a computer?" I say, "Yes." He said, "Right. What I want you to do, simple check, verify what we're seeing, hold down the Windows key and then press R." I'm winding him up. I get this all wrong. R, Windows. Eventually, I say, "I'm holding down the Windows key and I've pressed R." He says, "Brilliant. What's on the screen?" I said, "Nothing. Did you want me to turn it on?"

Apparently, he did.

So we did turn the computer on after he said some words. And we logged in and we did the Windows-R thing, and then he said, "In the little dialog box that pops up, I want you to type the letters I-N-F," which he describes as India November Foxtrot. I get that wrong. Got most annoyed when I asked him how many O's were in November.

But I did that in the end, and when you press Return, it opens `C:\Windows\INF`. And he explains to me, those icons there in that window is your computer under attack. That's the sign of a cyber attack.

So I now get handed to a lady on layer two support. She's very helpful, although slightly passive-aggressive, I've got to admit. But she's trying to convince me that their team there can help me with the problem. But I try and catch her out. I throw her a curveball by saying, "My computer has 11 different antivirus systems on it. How do these get through?"

And she says, "These are very sophisticated attacks and only our systems can detect them." I'm like, "Okay." And she then puts me through to the guy who's going to solve all my problems.

I don't think we hit it off. It turns out my inability to type in shortened URLs and download remote access software and question his wisdom on whether my virus scanner is doing its job or not really began to rile him. And the relationship deteriorated quite quickly.

At one point, I asked to be handed back to the lady on layer two, but apparently that wasn't a thing. And voices got raised. We fell out. He started shouting.

And he said, "You see the keyboard?" I said, "Yes." He says, "You see the Enter key?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "You see the key with the wavy line on it?" I said, "The tilde key?" "Well, that's not the tilde key. That's the banana key. And that banana is for you, my friend, because you are a monkey."

Now, I haven't been called a monkey as an insult since I was six. And before I could reply with, "No, you're a monkey and so is your mom," which is what I would've done at six, he started to shout at me to hang up, and I couldn't work out why.

And then I twigged that the way he routed the phone call through meant that you couldn't hang up. I did hang up eventually when he shouted at me he was Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law, and he was coming to get me. I thought that was a suitable moment to do that.

And I suppose the moral of this story is when you're with your friends and family and they ask you to help with the computer problems, do so because you don't want them making a monkey out of your loved ones.

Thank you very much.