Month: January 2017

Tech support scammers in India got trapped on the phone with me for nearly two hours, and all they got was a revocation of their remote access software ID. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Technical support scams are the bottom of the barrel for cyber-crime. Using well-worn social engineering techniques that generally only work on the least sophisticated computer users, these bootleg call-center operations generally use a collection of commercially available tools to either convince their victims to pay exorbitant fees for "security software" or to extort them to gain control of their computer. And yet, these schemes continue to rake in cash for scammers.

We've dealt with them before at Ars, but this week I got an opportunity to personally engage with a scam operation—so naturally, I attempted to inflict as much damage on it as possible.

On Monday afternoon, I got a phone call that someone now probably wishes they never made. Caller ID said the call was coming from "MDU Resources," but the caller said he was calling from "the technical support center." He informed me there were "junk files" on my computer slowing it down, and he was going to connect me with a technician to help fix the problem.

Sherry Towers

A millennium ago, the Pueblo peoples were constructing incredible monuments and cities throughout the US southwest. Among the most impressive structures they left behind is called the Sun Temple, in what is now Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park. Probably the location for meetings and ceremonies, the Sun Temple is an enormous D-shaped building with walls that were once 11-15 feet high. Now, an applied mathematician has discovered something intriguing about the proportions used to lay out the temple and its internal structures.

Physicist Sherry Towers is part of the Mathematical, Computational, and Modeling Sciences Group at Arizona State University, and she occasionally takes time away from physics to focus on the way mathematical patterns shape the social world. She got interested in the Sun Temple site because many archaeologists believe its structure might reveal whether the Pueblo peoples were using it for astronomy. But as Towers pored over satellite images of the area from Google Maps, the Sun Temple's general shape kept drawing her attention. "I noticed in my site survey that the same measurements kept popping up over and over again," she said in a release. "When I saw that the layout of the site's key features also involved many geometrical shapes, I decided to take a closer look."