Passwords, Financial Documents, log-in details for social sites, vacation and private photographs, contracts…. we all have them on our computers.
Well, what happens when your computer crashes and you continue to have problems? If you are not a computer technician, you take them in to get fixed. Right?
Well you might have second thoughts after reading this.
“Some computer repair shops are illegally accessing personal data on customers’ hard drives – and even trying to hack their bank accounts, a Sky News investigation has found. “
“In one case, passwords, log-in details and vacation photographs were all copied onto a portable memory stick by a technician. In other shops, customers were charged for non-existent work and simple faults were misdiagnosed.”
Engineers from the Sky News investigation team set up an easily diagnosable and fixable problem by “loosening the connection of the internal memory chip”, which prevented the Windows OS to load. All that had to be done to get the computer working again was to simply pushing the chip back into position.
The investigation targeted six different computer repair shops and all of them misdiagnosed or overcharged for the fault but one.
“The most serious offender was Revival Computers in Hammersmith, West London. Shortly after identifying the real fault, an engineer called our undercover reporter to say the computer needed a new motherboard, which would cost $200.”
“The surveillance software then recorded one technician browsing through the files on the hard drive, including private documents and intimate vacation photos, including some of our researcher in her bikini.”
After this incident, Revival Computers had its membership in Britain’s Professional Computing Association suspended.
The U.S. Council of Better Business Bureaus said it received 1,595 complaints regarding computer service and repair in 2008, a 23 percent jump from the previous year.
“This is one of those industries — like auto repair — where you have to trust that the technician is being honest… With a computer technician, there’s a larger threat of identity theft or other violations of privacy.”
Make a few calls around to see if you have any connections before you take your stuff in to a stranger. It’s always better to take a little bit longer than rushing and winding up with some issues… technical, or financial.
Check out the original article - Exposed: Repair Shops Hack Your Laptops
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Must confess. The findings of the investigation does not surprise me at all and nowadays I would rather buy a new PC than take the old one to a repair shop. I have personaly got enough computer knowledge to retrieve almost any data off any hard drive, password protected or deleted. No data is safe anymore and I would definitely not trust my laptop out of my view in a repair shop.