OT:Malware

[Bob Eager]

That's what I do if they're female. If they're male, I ask them about their boyfriend's underwear.

[stuart noble]

No discrimination there then

[Mark]

Or alternatively they may take this as a sign of success and employ more people to operate the scam.

[Bob Eager]

May their phone system be stolen by weasels.

[Andrew May]

Not much of a success if they didn't get any money out of it.

On a completely different note and whilst discussing this. One for the Linux gurus. How secure is something like VirtualBox in isolating an image. If I had mad a clone of my Windows image in VirtualBox could I have given them access to it to see what they did without compromising the rest of the machine. Would this be affected by the fact that I have shared folders configured?

Andrew

[Paul - xxx]

Or infected by malware ... ;)

Hoist by their own petard would be somewhat fitting.

[Bernard Peek]

You could build a VM that is safe to expose to the scammers. The restrictions you would need to apply to do that safely means the VM won't be of much use for anything else. It can't have access to any network shares and can't hold any confidential data.

[Andrew May]

Well that would be OK then. I only use VM to run iTunes and the music is on a share that could be disconnected. So just vanilla XP. Might be interesting next time they call. If only just to see what they do. Of course, I could leave some fake personal data on it just to get them salivating a bit.

Andrew