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[Closed] Parents IT dramas and disbelief

bubs · 2021-09-28T21:09:53Z

My Octogenarian parents email has been hacked. I found out that all incoming email has been diverted to “Amanda.vince1@protonmail.com”.... really not very subtle ... and something else is going on with outbound mail. So I’ve done what I can to shore things up but I can’t even change their password and so I may as well have just left a sign up saying “come in - everybody’s welcome”. It turns out that they are paying TalkTalk just to use their email addresses (they left TalkTalk broadband years ago..I didn’t know people pay for personal email addresses) but as a result they can’t change their password without talking to an advisor as they don’t have an account. TalkTalk have known of their problems for 2 weeks but done nothing but take their money. Another call tomorrow. So..what can I do to make them safer? Ideally I’d like them to move to a gmail account or similar but they don’t want to start again with a new address (fair-dos I wouldn’t want to either). Is there a way to add an extra level of security somehow? The pc is riddled with bloatware and massively slowed by Bullguard security. Should I just strip it right back, reinstall windows and try and get them to trust windows 10 security? I’ve got used to things just working and so had forgotten about pc pain. Aaaaagh!!!

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mmannerr

Posts: 1012

Full Member

My parents special IT skill is to call me at random time and tell that "computer does not work" and when asked about it is usually "we don't know, there was some error message 3 months ago and we can't remember what it was".
To be fair, it is usually about some service or subscription and not the computer itself.

Posted : 01/10/2021 7:47 am

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