Elderly relative's laptop's been hacked

[Fudgegirl338]

Hi all 

My not very IT savvy elderly relative's computer has been hacked and she made the mistake of calling the phone number on her screen that claimed to be Microsoft help and logged into her bank account for these charming people. Luckily she began to smell a rat, got my brother round who sorted the bank issue and the account is frozen for the moment.

She's a TalkTalk customer so my question is, if she gets a new 'clean' and up to date laptop and connects via her TalkTalk WIFI, will she have the same IP address and will that enable whoever hacked into the old one to still have access?

I'm not sure she's got Home Safe turned on so will get her to do that and the call screening is now turned on because of course, they have her phone number now that she's rung them.

Apologies if this is a naïve question and TIA for any help.

[Karl-TalkTalk]

Hi

The information from my colleague is correct. Hackers will usually ask their intended victim to install some type of remote control software, usually Teamviewer is a common one, but there are others. If any software was installed they should uninstall it immediately.

Thanks  

Karl. 

[Skynet_TX]

Hi @Fudgegirl338,

The IP address should not really be relevant here. If the hackers did something to allow remote access to her machine it would have been something they would have installed on the laptop. To be on the safe side you could also do a factory reset of the router, it is unlikely this is necessary, as I doubt there is any way the hackers could have found out the credentials to log into the router and change any settings, but there have been situations where router settings can be changed to divert traffic via the hackers systems to allow them to 'snoop'. So doing a factory reset of the router by holding in the reset switch on the back for over 10 seconds would ensure the router settings were as they were when TalkTalk first sent it out.

But to answer your IP address question anyway, if she is on ADSL then the IP address would normally change with every reboot of the router, if she is on fibre then the IP address can be much more 'sticky' and can be harder to get a new one, but leaving the router off for a good long period of time is the easiest way to try to get a new one, but as I say, this is not really necessary anyway.