Andy Burgin

Okay. Hi, my name's Andy, and the more observant of you in the room will already have realized that I am not local. I'm from a place called Leeds in the UK.

I mention that because, being from the UK, we don't celebrate Thanksgiving. It's not a concept I'm familiar with. But I understand it's a pretty big deal, and I'm sure many of you, over the next week or so, will be traveling many miles to be with friends and family, getting together, and having a good socializing. Probably eating turkey seems to be a thing you do at this, but okay. And probably having some drinks and some fun.

But I find when I get together with my friends and family, as someone who works in IT, I have a superpower unlocked. And it doesn't matter if you're a dev or an op or a BA or a tester or a CIO or CTO. You could even be an auditor. This superpower is unlocked because, at some point over your visit, someone's going to say, "Could you look at the computer? It's running a bit slow."

And I don't know about you, but I'm not particularly a great fan of spending my free time running antivirus software and spyware removal and the never-ending Windows update of a Dell laptop.

Anyway. But there are people out there who would be more than happy to help your friends and family with their computer problems, but they might be scammers. They might steal passwords, bank details, install cryptoware and stuff. And I understand these people will phone you out of the blue and claim to be some Windows support helpline.

And I don't like these scammers, and I always thought if I got phoned by one of them, I would tease them, I would mock them, and I would waste their time. And sure enough, last summer I got phoned by one of them.

I answered the phone. They said, "Hello, this is Windows support. I'm afraid your computer is under attack."

I said, "Goodness me. Thank goodness you phoned. Can you help me?"

He said, "Yes, we can."

Now, I'm under some complicated three-layer attack at this point. The first gentleman is trying to convince me that I've got a problem, so he runs me through some basic tests. He says, "Are you sat at a computer?"

I said, "Yes."

He said, "I want you to hold down the Windows key and press R."

Of course, I'm trying to wind him up, so I'm getting this very wrong. So I'm pressing Windows and R, and R and Windows. Eventually, I say, "I'm holding down the Windows key and pressing R."

He says, "Brilliant. What's on the screen?"

I said, "Nothing. Do you want me to turn it on?"

So that upset him quite a bit. So we got to the point where we turned the computer on and opened the Windows Run dialogue, and he said, "I want you to type the letters I-N-F into the Run dialogue," which he explained as India November Foxtrot. I got that a bit wrong. He got particularly angry when I asked him how many O's were in November.

But we got there. And apparently, those icons in `C:\Windows\INF` is my computer under attack. That's the telltale sign of a cyberattack.

I'm now handed over to a lady on layer two support. She's very pleasant, a little passive-aggressive for my liking. But she explains to me that they can help me with my computer problem.

So I say, "Oh, that's great," but I try and catch her out. I throw her a curveball. I say, "My computer has Windows Defender and antivirus AVG Free Edition installed. How come these viruses are getting through?"

She said, "Well, these are very advanced attacks that only our systems can pick up."

So I'm like, "Okay, well, let's proceed."

And I got handed over to layer three. I don't think we hit it off. Apparently, my inability to type in shortened URLs to download remote access software, and me questioning his wisdom on whether antivirus software was actually doing its job properly, kind of upset him, and he got quite angry with me.

At one point, I asked to be handed back to the lady on layer two, but couldn't do that, apparently. He got particularly angry with me in the end and started raising his voice, and he said, "You see the keyboard?" And this is a UK keyboard. "Next to the Enter key, there's a key with a wavy line on it."

I said, "Yeah, the tilde key."

He said, "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 probably six years old. I didn't really know how to react. But we ended up shouting at one another because he wanted me to hang up, and I realized the way he'd routed the phone call through, he couldn't hang up. So the voices got raised, and eventually, he said he was Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law, and he was coming to get me.

I thought this was a suitable moment to hang up.

And I suppose the moral of this story is, over Thanksgiving, when you're with your friends and your family, and they ask for help with the computer, do so, because you don't want scammers making a monkey out of your relations.

Thank you very much.