About the caller having curser moving and clicking on its own. Leo suspects a “Evil Roommate” is remotely messing.
I would like to know what the computer history would show. Might lead to the culprit!
I had a prank USB dongle that would emulate a mouse/keyboard, it would randomly send keystrokes and/or mouse movement. I used to hang it off noobie woorkstations back when offices were a thing. If the roommate is a prankster it could be one of those.
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I sometimes see this type of problem because of a serial device being detected as a Microsoft serial mouse by Windows. This can happen with USB devices that use RS-232 bridge chipsets (still fairly common), or a regular RS-232 serial device, if they start sending data at power up.
For that situation the troubleshooting is easy, simply disconnect all USB and RS-232 connected devices, except mice and keyboards, and reboot. If it comes up OK then you can re-connect devices one at a time and reboot to figure out which device is triggering the automatic mouse detection. There is a registry hack to stop the problem although the hack gets overwritten on some Windows updates (It seems to happen at least once a year to me).
Yeah I’m always very reluctant to ascribe to a hacker what can easily be explained by human/computer error, but this case was pretty convincing:
- The mouse movements did not seem random, windows were being opened, programs were being run.
- All activity stopped when the caller was in view of the laptop’s camera
- He had left the computer logged in and running on the kitchen table when his roommates were home.
I think it was most likely a set-up call (you’d be surprised how many of these we get) but if he was being honest, I’d have to conclude that all signs point to a RAT.
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Yeah, there have definitely been calls where it felt like the person on the other end was “playing to the crowd.” I guess this is how talk radio shows are vulnerable to social engineering.