Are Chat Rooms Safe? Should You Be Worried?

Are chatrooms really safe?

For as long as chatrooms have been available, everyone’s been asking the same question again and again,’ are chatrooms safe?’ The answer is actually quite simple, it depends on how you handle chatrooms.

Chatrooms work the same way as email or any other messenger. If you hand out your personal information, click on unknown or suspicious links, download files you are not aware of, then you are compromising your security.

If you regularly use chatrooms on the internet, here’s how you can protect yourself from becoming a victim of a cybercrime.

Protect your personal information

No matter what happens, do not hand over your personal information such as your full name, phone number, identification number, home address, office phone, your cell phone number or any other details that are sensitive. Through this information, cybercriminals can easily dig out additional information about you and your family and they can then use this information to blackmail you.

Never download a document

If someone tries to hand you over a document, a file or an image over a chatroom, do not download it immediately. Hackers and cyber criminals create special files that are actually executables disguised inside other formats. When you open these files, they immediately release viruses and malicious tools into your system which helps them gather data from your system. Some of these files may even contain ransomware which can lock your important data and ask for a ransom.

Never pay anyone on a chatroom

If you are in a chatroom which asks for money to continue taking part in the chat, you must avoid it at all cost. There are tons of chatrooms these days that use this technique to scam people and take away their money. You may actually be tempted to give away your money and you would only find a chatbot at the other end with no way of getting your money back. Sometimes when you intend to pay to these chatrooms, they may even record your personal credit card data and use it to buy off stuff from the internet.

Chatrooms are safe but it really just requires a bit of common sense to differentiate between scammers and the real people.

The post Are Chat Rooms Safe? Should You Be Worried? appeared first on Cyber Security Portal.

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