Having someone bully you is a high form of maltreatment. Studies have shown that bullying affects your mental health, which often leads to chronic depression. But do you know bullying also happens online? This kind is popularly called cyber bullying. 

What is cyber bullying? This is a form of bullying or harassment using electronic means. Cyberbullying and/or cyber harassment is often termed as ‘online bullying’. This is usually common among young teens and youths. These harmful bullying can be in the form of issuing threats, spreading rumors, blackmailing, leaking personal information and lots more. 

Cyberbullying is mostly performed by hackers and cybercriminals. They breach your security, hack into your cloud, and extort your personal information, leak them and use it to torment you, until you give them what they want or do what they tell you to do. This is a recurrent situation and can only be prevented if you have a strong security network and have more knowledge about these happenings.

 

Cyberbullies usually target young and naïve internet users, who have little or no knowledge of how to protect themselves online. According to Wikipedia, “By 2008, 93% of young people between the ages of 12 and 17 were online. In fact, youth spend more time with the media than any single other activity besides sleeping”. This resulted to a heavy surge of cyberbullying, as cyber criminals took advantage of this naïve generation. Their skill set include:

  1. Email bullying: Hacking into your email with threats and cruel messages, compelling you to do what they want you to do. It is also an avenue to transmit malware.
  2. Image sharing: Leaking personal images and secret webcam images without permission of the user.
  3. Impersonation: Impersonating someone close or familiar with the user and tricking them into sending personal information.
  4. Video Spamming: Sharing a leaked video of a victim through text messages, and on video showing platforms like YouTube. 

MENTAL HEALTH AND CYBER BULLYING

Our mental health should always be protected. Studies have shown that youths and young teens who are targeted through cyberbullying show an increased rate in depression, anxiety, suicidal behavior, and many others. According to researchers, mental health issues because of cyberbullying leads to depression, anxiety, and substance use. 

A new study reported that an alarming 87 percent of youths today have witnessed cyberbullying. To avoid being a victim to cyberbullies, always practice some safety precisions such as:

  1. Increase internet security
  2. Educate yourself on cyber security. You can read lots of them here on our blog
  3. Teach younger ones about the dangers of cyberbullying 
  4. Deleting spam messages
  5. Spreading awareness about cyber security

CONCLUSION

We encounter bullies everyday as we live, whether online or offline. We must understand the effect this has in our daily actions, and our mental health. Our mental health is our most cherished possession and must not be tampered with. Always educate yourself and have more knowledge on cyber security, and security procedures as an end user. 

We are Platview Technologies. We are an innovative and agile cybersecurity company with the goal of safe-guarding businesses with our world-class, industry-leading services and technology solutions. We commit to understanding your business objectives and goals to align a tailored security services and strategy allowing your business to grow without added security risk.