Twice I have received a phone call from “Antony” purporting to be from “Windows”. He says that they have had a large number of error messages from my system recently and wants to help me to find the cause. He then asks me to press the CTRL + Windows + R key combination on the computer. I am already suspicious – why should anyone from Microsoft want to speak to me on the phone? How would he know my telephone number anyway? He doesn’t know what version of Windows I am running and has to ask me (I am using Windows XP, by the way). So I politely say that I do not believe that anyone from Windows would want to talk to me, I am going to ignore his instruction and I am going to put the phone down. Was I being paranoid or sensible? Also, what does the CTRL + Windows + R key combination do?

Several of my colleagues have also reported being contacted in a similar way, and you are quite sensible to treat this with a degree of scepticism as such phone calls are indeed a scam. Microsoft would never contact you unsolicited about problems being experienced with your computer as, above anything else, it would be completely infeasible for Microsoft to be monitoring all Windows systems in the world for errors and then following-up with users about such errors. Even if they were monitoring they would not have any way to know your contact details. These phone calls are generally being placed by scammers attempting to prey on unfortunate users who are not too familiar with their computers and usually result in getting the user to install some “helpful” software on their computer to “resolve” the problem, but in actual fact infect the computer with malware which then monitors all your activity on the computer (such as keystrokes) and then sends this information back to the malicious party. In the case of the malware monitoring keystrokes, this could result in very sensitive information being sent back to the malicious persons including passwords and financial information (such as any credit card numbers entered into the computer when shopping online). If you receive any more of these phone calls I don’t even suggest you try being polite – once you’ve established it is one of these scam phone calls just hang-up so you don’t waste any more time.

If any readers have followed the instructions of these phone calls then there is a high probability your system has been infiltrated with malware which could be compromising your privacy and sending information back to the malicious party. In this case, I strongly suggest that you backup all of your data and then complete a clean reinstallation of Windows. As you may have read in my previous columns, while some people suggest that you can clean malware from your computer, once your computer has been compromised you can never completely trust it again (as there may be components of the infection remaining behind, undetected). Therefore, I always recommend the clean reinstallation approach to completely remove any infections.

Regarding the CTRL + Windows + R key combination, as far as I can tell this doesn’t do anything in Windows itself (although in Microsoft Word it appears to right-align a segment of text). My only thoughts are that this key combination activates malware should it already be installed on the computer. The person on the phone may be asking you to use that key combination to check whether the malware is installed (and if so, activate the malware) and if nothing happens then they may proceed with giving you instructions to install the malware. So I wouldn’t be concerned if you have pressed that key combination, since by itself, it shouldn’t do anything. Only be concerned if you have followed instructions given by the person on the phone which could have potentially compromised your computer or installed their malware.