I received a call yesterday from a man with an Indian subcontinent or maybe middle eastern accent. He said that he was phoning from Microsoft. I could not hear him very well partly because of his accent and also I have a hearing impairment. He said that my computer was in dnager of crashing and that I should also cease to use my computer for online shopping until the problem is resolved. He toook me through a number of stages of a process to draw my attention to computer management issues and inparticular events marked with a red circle bearing an exclamation mark. He then tries to get me to use my search engine to enter a site and I ended the phone conversation stating that I was not sure that he was from Microsoft. I doubted that Microsoft would get some one to make a 'cold call'? My questions relate to: 1) whether this was probably someone trying to access my computer or was it someone from Microsoft and if so, shouldn't there really be an advance e-mail or alert from Microsoft before someone phones? 2) What action should I take, if any about the redcircles with the exclamation mark. I should state that I am not good on the technical language and prefer a step by step approach.

Hi , Please contact your local Microsoft Customer Service to check the call issue. http://www.microsoft.com/worldwide/ Also, I suggest using the antivirus which installed on your computer or downloading Microsoft Security Essentials to scan the system. Tracy Cai TechNet Community Support

Microsoft would never reach out to you unless you initiated the conversation first. I work in a computer repair shop, and we have gotten 3 - 4 people that have let this guy into their systems remotely, and told them to go to this website, where an actual worm was downloaded to their system, we ended up going to the site at our shop and we saw MSE light up on just about all of our systems within one day, it was halarious. then he will tell you have all these issues with your computer, and get you to pay him, and once you refuse payment, he will destroy your system files, or upload more trojans to hide all your files, disable firewall and security center, please follow these av instructions download and run rkill combofix malwarebytes mse make sure the appropreiate firewall ports are closed and opened, only whats needed. then run cmd and type sfc /scannow if that fails do, system restore, and then run sfc /scannow and if that fails again, its more time feasble to just backup all your data, drivers, find application cds, and do a wipe and reload of the system. then do all windows updates, update all drivers and firmware, bios, java, flash, adobe browser, etc. and turn off services that are not needed for normal operations, and turn off unneeded startup programs to harden the os, make sure to only open appropreiate firewall ports on your network router and host. and get MSE with malwarebytes and ccleaner, or go with kaspersky, malwarebytes, and ccleaner, and do not let anyone remotely log into your system for any reason unless you initiated the conversation and trust the person you are speaking with. I have already reported this guy to the FBI, if we are speaking about the same guy.