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Questions Linger After ISP Blocks TeamViewer Over Fraud Fears (sophos.com)
Last Wednesday, for no apparent reason, the TeamViewer remote desktop application stopped working on the network of one of the UK's largest ISPs, TalkTalk. The apparent reason, as the investigation has found, are some scammers in India who have been abusing the application to make money. An anonymous reader shares a report: It's a popular application with remote support professionals and power users alike and so support forums soon filled with complaints from perplexed users who noticed that access was possible with 4G and some TalkTalk business connections but not home broadband. By Thursday, journalists dragged the truth out of the company that it had "blocked a number of applications including TeamViewer," which led to a joint statement confirming this on TeamViewer's website: TeamViewer and TalkTalk are in extensive talks to find a comprehensive joint solution to better address this scamming issue. We now know (as some suspected at the time) that the block was connected to abuse of TeamViewer by criminals based in India who had been using it as part of a tech support scam targeting TalkTalk customers. The BBC reported on this two days before the block, including the disturbing claim that the criminals had been able to quote stolen customer account data to make scam calls sound more convincing.
blacklist teamviewer connections from india?
Yes they can still use proxies, but anything to make their life more difficult... Like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
My neighbor keeps being taken advantage of by scammers in India and Eastern Europe. TeamViewer seems to be the tool of choice. I finally talked her into putting Linux on there (she doesn't really know what that means) and blackholed all DNS requests for every website I could find that is even remotely related to remote access. Many won't work on Linux but I'd rather not find out. Firefox is set to block add-ons. Life is much better now and she has no problem with her shiny new Linux system.
I wish there was something we could do to better protect the elderly. Blocking TeamViewer may be a great idea for the elderly who fall victim to scams several times a day, but they're a little misguided to do so for everyone.
Talk yes. They do a lot of that but they're a bit busy right now with another minor issue so if you want an ISP that doesn't block your access to TeamViewer you have a choice of dozens. TalkTalk are a terrible ISP in any case and anyone who is using TeamViewer for anything should have more sense than to go anywhere near them.
Most of the country has access to more than two ISP's. Cable and DSL alone are almost everywhere population density isnt absurdly low. Cellular and satellite has even more availability, but is of course more expensive and/or has too much latency for things like multi-player gaming.
What happens is that in some very high population density areas the local governments have given Cable and DSL operators such strong unchallengeable monopolies that they never upgrade their services. Essentially those areas are stuck with bandwidths that were only average as much as a two decade ago. 1mbit DSL's and 3mbit DOCSIS's.
The complaints you see here are from people that dont even know which local government seat is responsible for granting the monopolies. They will cry for some national solution to their local problem instead taking even a moment to figure out which local politician needs to be voted out. A week or so ago I took a few such moments to post who the local politicians were in Seattle, a city that is almost 3000 miles away from me. It seems I care more than the complainers.
"His name was James Damore."