Call from 0102100 – Fake Microsoft Technical Support

If by chance you did a Google Search for 0102100 and you are still on the phone to these muppets, hang up.

We have 30 sequential direct line telephone numbers and over the last few days we’ve been receiving calls from 0102100 to each DDI one by one. My employees said it was “Microsoft Technical Support” on the phone saying they had a virus or vulnerability on their computer and that they needed to install an easy patch/fix immediately. Thankfully all my staff are clever and spot a scam a long way off, some even suggested putting them through to our IT Department (me) which they didn’t like.

I was looking forward to them calling my DDI (I know, sad isn’t it!) so I could play along with their little charade and at the end tell them I’m on a Mac but I missed their call. Fortunately they were stupid enough to think that my voicemail was a real human and left a message which comes through to me as an email so I upload it to SoundCloud:

I was hoping to speak to them to see exactly what it was they tried to get you to install and post more detailed description here to help warn others or aid with malware removal. My guess is they send you to a URL which would be some crappy trying-to-look-like-microsoft-tech-support-domain and ask you to download an .exe which would then give them access to your machine to do as they please, perhaps cryptolocker, perhaps just a key or screen logger or just install an unnecessary PC Protection app for an annual fee.

Long story short. If you get a call from 0102100 it is FAKE, HANG UP!

Fix for WordPress no longer sending email notification of comments

For some unknown reason I suddenly stopped getting an email notification to alert me when a comment had been left on one of my blog entries regardless of the settings selected in the WP admin pages.

I tried several different options and plugins to try and fix this I even tried resorting to using a plugin to allow SMTP to send the notifications but none of them worked.

I then read this thread over on the WordPress support forums and on page 4, thanks to teknics there is a fix that worked instantly for me. Just a simple addition to my .htaccess file was all that was needed, if you alread have a .htaccess in place please be careful not to mess up anything else in the file as it could prevent your site from working.
Just adding the following line to the end of the .htaccess file was all that was needed:

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<strong><span style="color: #ff0000;">php_value mail.force_extra_parameters '-f webmaster@example.com'</span></strong>

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