Rakuten Viber advised to remove photos of documents from correspondence in messengers
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Photos of documents sent by users in instant messengers can become prey for cybercriminals. Mila Rogulina, PR director of Rakuten Viber in Russia and the CIS countries, spoke about this in an interview with Lenta.ru. She also advised the Russians to remove all personal information from correspondence.
“If for some reason you still want to share your boarding pass for an airplane, a photo of your visa or a successful photo in your passport, hide all important information: do not include it in the frame or paint it over in a photo editor. It is highly undesirable to share bank card data (number, expiration date, CVV code) in messengers, as well as any passwords or pin codes,” said Rogulina.
In her opinion, even the most harmless types of information can be of value to fraudsters. These include the user's phone number, which Rakuten Viber recommends hiding from strangers in the messenger settings, home address, places of work and study. In addition, it is important not to share geolocation data unnecessarily.
“Do not say anything extra when talking to strangers or posting information in the public domain, such as in communities or group chats. If you share personal data with friends, delete this information or use additional features of applications. For example, Viber has disappearing messages that are deleted after a selected time,” Rogulin advised.
She added that it is better to use secure messengers for correspondence. For example, those in which end-to-end encryption is enabled by default. In such applications, all data is transmitted in encrypted form, and only the participants in the correspondence can read it.
Earlier, Ashot Hovhannisyan, the founder of the DLBI data leak intelligence and darknet monitoring service, revealed the cost of determining the exact location of any Russian. The price of such a service on the black market is about eight thousand rubles. On the darknet, this service is called one-time location determination of the subscriber (“flash”).
