Parents Laptop Compromised

[jimborae]

So the parents laptop has been compromised I suspect as my Dad had a pop up saying PC is infected, call this number etc etc. so he did. Guy from India setup a remote connection to it and has installed god knows what now before my Dad's age ravaged brain told him it was a scam and he cut the call and shut the laptop off. So Dad's bringing round the lappy tonight, I think the easiest option is to just wipe and reinstall but I'm worried that the hackers may have accessed passwords to email, online banking or credit cards. Is this likely and should he change all these???

[Goobley]

It would certainly be wise to change all the passwords you can find. If things like Bank Details were saved unencrypted somewhere on the drive then the bank ought to be contacted too. If you can get an idea of what data was on the machine and could have been compromised then do so, then you probably want to save data such as photos (and make sure you give these folders a decent AV scan). Then nuke the drive and reinstall. (To check the data on the laptop it may be easiest just to pull the drive and put it into your desktop).

[jimborae]

Yeah I'll be pulling the drive & blanking it as a matter of course I'm just really concerned as to what private data they may have accessed. Trouble is Dad's memory is not what it was due to old age so he's unlikely to be able to remember what passwords were on the laptop or what he's used it for.

[GoNz0]

why pull the drive, safe mode will be enough to run anti spyware and see what you are up against if it will automatically connect to your wifi. end of the day the risk is it getting on the internet and passing info back so taking it to you may be enough to keep it off the net while you work on it, or get a bootable scanner like kaspersky rescue?

Trouble is with people like your dad is the chance they have not backup up some important stuff you may need to save before nuking it

If it is simple to cleanup why not install lastpass, that will pull passwords stored for various things allowing you to see, save or change them and then Dad's only got to remember a single password. It can even change passwords every so often for some sites adding to the security.