Is that your picture? How scammers play on curiosity and steal passwords

The Department for Combating the Illegal Use of Information and Communication Technologies of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia in St. Petersburg and Leningrad region warned that in messengers, attackers have again intensified. They play on curiosity: they send a message allegedly from a friend asking if you are in the photo. For persuasiveness, you can say that the picture has already been posted somewhere - on a third-party site or in a social network.

Inside the message is a link. Going through it is dangerous: it leads either to a phishing site that steals logins and passwords, or to a page with a malicious file. If you download such a file, you can lose access to accounts or infect the device.

Do not give in to the temptation to check what is the photo. Even if the message came from a best friend, it is not a guarantee of security - his account could be hacked. It is better to delete the message immediately and call the sender to make sure that he did not send anything. And if you still clicked on the link, do not enter any data, even if the page looks familiar. Fraudsters often copy the design of popular services.

And one more thing: never enter passwords and confirmation codes on unfamiliar sites. If you have done so, change your password immediately and end all extraneous sessions in your account settings. Do not download files from unverified sources, even if they look harmless.

Beware: scammers continually come up with new tricks, but the security rules remain the same.