Someone is in my computer controlling it, what do I do?
Hi everyone.
Leo Notenboom, here for AskLeo.com. Here's a question,
an example of a question I got, and it's a question that I get fairly frequently.
"My computer is being controlled and I cannot load anything I've purchased.
Seems like when I changed my password, it asks several times.
Not good.
Also, when I do, it is intercepted and blocked.
Why? This is my personal home computer."
As I said, I get variations on this kind of question fairly often.
Somebody believes that their computer is
being monitored, being played with, that somebody has access to it,
and is basically screwing around with them with some kind of malicious intent.
The bottom line, of course,
is that they're convinced that someone is spying on them, or worse.
What happens next, I can only say is complicated.
Now, before I go on, I want to basically acknowledge two things.
One is, if this is honestly really happening to you, I can't help you.
That's not a service I could provide.
And you'll find that most people who are doing the kind of thing that I do online
are unable to assist with these kinds of scenarios.
This is a situation where you really need
to get in person, on premises, help from somebody who can take a look
at the specifics of your situation, the specifics of your machine,
and help you through whatever it is that's going on.
The reality, though,
is that given the number of people that generally come to me with this kind
of suspicion, I have to say something also.
That may not be the answer you want to hear.
And that is that in my experience,
I'd say nine times out of ten, there's nobody stalking you.
There is no spyware.
Now, again, I don't want to minimize those
scenarios where something is really, truly, honestly happening.
And I really do want you to reach out
to local authorities, local tech help, the emphasis there being on local because
they're going to need access to the equipment in your scenario
to degrees that I simply can't or don't have access to.
But let's drop back to the 90% case for a moment.
Nine times out of ten, in my experience, no, there actually is nothing going on.
It's unfortunate because by the time people come to me,
they are absolutely convinced that somebody is out to get them,
that somebody's spying on them, that somebody's messing with them.
Unfortunately,
we tend to fear things we don't understand.
And when our computer starts to behave
in ways we don't understand, we reach for solutions.
That kind of sort of makes sense to us when these kinds of things start
to happen, when you don't have a reasonable explanation for why your
computer is behaving the way it's behaving, it's really easy to jump to some
bad conclusions that maybe you're being spied on or worse.
Now, here's a really frustrating part.
At least from my position,
and I know that this applies to a lot of other people as well.
Even though nine times out of ten,
nobody is looking at you, nobody is spying on you, nobody is messing with you.
I can't prove it.
I can't prove that someone is not spying on you.
I can't prove a negative.
I can't prove that your machine does not have malware.
I can't prove that my machine doesn't have malware.
It's not possible.
Logically, you can't prove a negative.
If you find traces of malware, you've proven there's malware.
But the lack of traces doesn't mean there's a lack of malware.
It simply means you haven't found them,
which may or may not indicate that it's not there.
So when something happens that you don't understand or expect,
I can't prove to you that someone isn't messing with you.
But I can give you some things to look at, some more mundane explanations for,
some of the things that you may be seeing, some of the behaviors that you may be
experiencing that you might be chalking up to being spied on.
For example, it's very common to do something with a program and have it
misbehave, have it not act the way you expect it to act.
Nine times out of ten, that's because it was used in an appropriate way.
You click the wrong thing, you type the wrong thing.
It was in the wrong state.
There's any number of different ways to do
things wrong in computer programs, and as a result,
it can misbehave in ways that perhaps aren't that easy to understand.
It's possible that you're typing in the wrong password if you're having
troubles logging in again, this can happen.
It can be the sign of a hacked account,
which itself is not necessarily a sign of somebody spying on you.
Nine times out of ten, if you're typing in a bad password,
if you mistyped your password, it's going to be a typo.
You've got the caps lock on key.
Or perhaps you just mistyped something
because there are, asterisks you can't see, what you're actually typing.
So it's really easy to get it wrong.
But even if it is truly wrong,
if in fact the password you think is the password is not the password because
the account has been hacked, that simply means the account has been hacked.
It does not mean that there's something going on with your computer.
Most hacks happen essentially on the other side of the planet from wherever you are.
So there's not somebody accessing your machine to cause an account hack.
If you can't log into an online account,
that's an online thing, not a computer thing.
A lot of people are concerned when they find files that have gone missing.
Well, every time I've had this situation
where a file has gone missing, it's because I deleted it.
I may not have realized at the time that I deleted it, but I deleted it.
Similarly, if you can't find a file, you may be looking in the wrong place.
I recently covered a scenario where
with OneDrive, there could be multiple documents folders on your machine.
It's not malicious,
it's not somebody spying on you, it's not somebody messing with you.
It's just poor design of the software, which makes it very easy to expect
something to be in one place, where in fact, it lives in another.
Again, I can't prove to you that nobody is
spying on you, but it's much more likely to be a mundane explanation.
One of the scenarios that really gets people a lot is in email.
Many email programs have the opportunity
to filter the view, which means you might say, show me only the unread emails.
So as soon as you read an email,
it disappears from the list because it's no longer unread.
There are a multitude of different kinds of views, different criteria.
You could say that only show me emails that match this criteria.
If you forget that you're looking
at a filtered view, then all of a sudden it looks like half your mail is gone.
It's still there.
It's just being hidden because you asked
for a view on your mail, or you accidentally asked for a view
on your mail that only causes some of the mail to be displayed.
One of the ones that I love are mouse movements.
Your mouse starts moving on its own. Magically.
It's very rare for that to be a malicious activity.
But what's much more common the mouse is dirty,
or the surface that you're on is not particularly a mouse friendly surface.
All that kind of stuff can cause the mouse pointer to move, or you've got a trackpad,
and you don't realize that your fingers getting close enough so that you're
actually moving the mouse yourself with, like, your thumb.
I've noticed on one of my trackpads, I don't even have to be touching it if I'm
literally hovering maybe a millimeter or so over the trackpad.
That's enough to confuse it into thinking I'm trying to do something.
Another one is typing,
where all of a sudden the computer starts typing on its own.
As odd as it seems, there are scenarios where that can happen.
The most common one being accidentally turning on dictation.
The dictation, by its very definition,
is the computer taking what's coming into the microphone,
interpreting that as your language, and then typing it on your behalf.
That absolutely looks like the computer is
typing on its own, especially when it's getting things wrong, right?
The technology is not perfect,
and if you don't realize that it's happening, you're probably not speaking
in the way you would want to if you were truly dictating.
You might be mumbling,
you might be talking to somebody across the room, any number of those kinds
of things that could cause the computer to think it's supposed to be typing for you.
But it's not.
As I said, all of these scenarios and many
many more are much more likely to be the cause of unexpected behavior than
somebody actually remote accessing your machine.
One of the catch 22s here is that if you were actually being spied on,
if someone was truly trying to infiltrate your computer and extract your information
or break things that are yours, it's much more likely you would see
absolutely nothing because they are motivated to hide.
That's why I see the mouse pointer
movement is, in my thinking, a complete red herring.
Because if somebody is accessing your
machine remotely, they don't want the mouse pointer to move.
They want to hide that from you so that they can do whatever it is they're doing.
There are a number of techniques,
depending on what kind of promote access tool they might or might not be using.
But the bottom line is that something as obvious as a moving mouse pointer or
something as obvious as characters being Typed on screen
typically is much more mundane than somebody remotely accessing your machine,
because it's in their interest to not show that kind of stuff so
that they can continue to hide and do what they're doing for a longer period of time.
So what do you do?
How do you prevent this kind of stuff from happening?
Well, honestly, it's the same old boring
stuff that we've been talking about for years.
Use up to date security software.
Keep your system and all software on it as up to date as possible.
Use strong passwords everywhere.
Don't reuse passwords and use two factor authentication wherever it's available.
Educate yourself to be on the lookout
for phishing attempts, and understand what it means when somebody
asks you to open an attachment that you didn't expect.
Honestly, that's how most malware arrives these days.
It's one of those things where a little
bit of education on your part can make a huge difference in your own security.
Of course, back up regularly.
Backing up regularly is one of those things that it doesn't necessarily prevent
anything from happening, but it sure allows you to recover
from something if it does, and then finally secure your hardware.
Now that one's worth a little bit more attention, mostly because
if there's going to be a real issue, this is kind of where it happens.
This is what I have seen as truly honest
and malicious access of somebody else's computer.
Don't let anyone ever touch your computer if you don't absolutely trust them.
If this is something you're concerned about, only let people you completely
trust access your computer, and that means not just setting it up, but repair.
If you don't trust the repair place, don't use the repair place.
Find one you do.
If you don't trust your ex boyfriend or
girlfriend to maintain your machine for you, which is what I hear happen,
don't let them find somebody else you can trust.
A lot of the scenarios that I do hear
about that turn out, to be honest to goodness,
malicious surveillance turn out to be broken relationships.
So don't rely on somebody that you don't trust to maintain your software.
If you suspect that they've done something, that there is in fact,
something on your machine, and in fact, yes, it was your old boyfriend or your ex
spouse or whatever that maintained the machine for you.
Stop using the machine.
Seriously, stop.
Don't take any chances.
Instead, find someone that you do trust to then help you secure your computer.
And yeah, that's the next step. Getting help.
This is not something that is taken lightly.
If you truly are concerned about
unauthorized surveillance by someone with malicious access to your machine,
then you need to find someone that you absolutely trust.
And in kind of a weird reversal of priorities, it's much more important
that you trust them than how much they know.
Someone you can trust can learn what they need to know.
But someone who claims to know everything but you don't really trust them?
No, that's too scary.
That's too risky.
Trust is the most important commodity in this scenario.
If you can't find someone, well, it's on you.
It's all on you.
Which is one of the reasons that I so
strongly suggest finding someone you absolutely can trust.
Because if you can't, you need to learn how to for yourself.
Do things like understand what it means to keep the system secure.
This is no small task.
This is a chunk of work.
You need to be able to install
the operating from scratch, having gotten it from a known trusted location.
You need to know how to install
and configure appropriately the software that you use every day.
You need to be able to configure your online accounts for maximum security.
You need to know what to look for when you suspect that something is wrong.
You need to know all these things unless you can find someone you trust.
That's again, why I keep coming back to find someone you truly, truly trust.
But if you can't, then you are on your own.
And do not take the shortcut of letting someone whom you don't trust try and do
this for you, because that's how this kind of stuff happens.
Now, if you suspect that you are under malicious surveillance, one don't panic.
Don't jump to conclusions,
because like I said, nine times out of ten, you probably aren't.
Look for much more mundane explanations for the behavior that you're seeing.
Do run full antimalware scans,
up to date antimalware scans on your system that will detect a lot
of the malicious software that's being used for this kind of thing.
Do review well, my article on Internet safety because it has a number of steps
and ideas and all of the things you need to do to keep yourself safe online.
And that's really all this boils down to.
And if indeed you're positive that you are
being spied on or that your system is being remotely controlled,
then the only thing the most important thing you should do is to seek out someone
trustworthy, to help you suss it out, to help you understand what's going
on and not just to fix it, but to prevent it from happening again.
I hope this is helpful. I really do.
This is one of those situations where, like I said, most of the time it's not
a problem, but when it's a problem, it's a big problem.
I understand that hopefully this will at least give you some guidance and things
to look at, places to go and people to reach out to for updates.
For Comments for related links and more, visit
https://askleo.com/142596.
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Ask Leo.com. Thanks for watching.