If you think the obsession with dolls, animals or other objects is enough tosomeone a weirdo, wait until you come across a stalker who makes you rethink the definition of weird. A stalker is someone who tails you when you are walking to your home, school or office. He lurks around your place day and night. He always tries to creep on every activity you do or people you meet when you are outside your home.

However, when you add cyber to stalking, your life becomes a whole lot hellish. Cyberstalking is like having a stalker in your home, who you cannot see but surely feel the sinister presence of, round the clock. The internet has empowered cyber stalkers to get inside our home, computers or Smartphones and get the deepest insights into our intimate life.

According to a Statistics Canada report, almost 1 in 5 Canadians (between the ages of 15-29) has been cyber-stalked or cyberbullied in the last five years. The worst part is women are more prone to experience cyber stalking than men.

The Telltale Signs of Cyber Stalking

Cyber stalkers are not always people you know. They can be people you don’t know at all. The stalker can be a person who had a crush on you the moment he saw you at a friend’s party, or in the school’s hall or the office premise.

The stalker can also be someone who happened to come across your social profile, and from then on he started following you around, trying to learn more about you. In short, a cyber stalker can be anyone you may or may not know. However, there are some signs that can help you detect the presence of a cyber stalker in your life.

• You may find the cyber stalker aggressively following you on every social profile you have, be it on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, etc. You would find his comments on every post you write.
• Another sign of cyberstalking is that the stalker keeps sending you emails on a daily basis, and may be texting you as well on your Smartphone.
• You may find the stalker everywhere you go, be it in shopping malls or cafes. One major reason is that he may be keeping track of your location through your phone’s GPS.
• The stalker may continuously try to get in touch with you either over your phone or through your social profiles.
• The stalker may also try to impersonate someone you know so he can get your personal information, and then use it for ulterior motives like blackmailing or online harassment.
• Signs of cyber stalking aren’t limited to your social profiles alone. In fact, the stalker may already be following your family members, friends, and relatives in an attempt to get as much information on you as possible.

Methods of Cyber Stalking

Now, you may be wondering, how can a cyber stalker collect so much information online?

There a number of ways cyber stalkers can extract your personal information. Here are some of the most common ways:

• As discussed in the signs of cyber stalking, one of the ways a stalker may follow you everywhere you go is through the GPS location feature on your Smartphone. Yes, it is possible through hacking or snooping.
• A cyber stalker doesn’t have to be a hacker himself. He can hack your social accounts with the aid of a hacker friend.
• A stalker can implant a malicious tool like a keylogger or any other malware on your computer or your personal device to extract personal information and in fact intimate data like risqué images.
• If the stalker lives nearby your house, he may even penetrate your home network to break into your smart devices for gaining information.

How to Prevent Cyberstalking

Fortunately, you can fight off a cyber stalker easily. Here are some tips on how to prevent cyberstalking:

• Start taking preventive measures such as changing your passwords of your social media, or your home network. First of all, create strong passwords that are hard to guess or hack. Secondly, don’t share your passwords with anyone, even with your closest friends.
• Try to create secondary email addresses for social profiles, forums or communities.
• Limit over-sharing of information on the Internet, especially social media profiles. After all, these networks are full of cyber stalkers.
• Encrypt your home network, your laptop, and even your Smartphone with a reliable VPN to protect yourself from all kinds of cyber stalking. A VPN can encrypt your phone GPS location so that no cyber stalker can track your actual location. Likewise, a VPN can also protect you from any unwanted malware, virus or keyloggers that cyberstalkers use to gain access to your personal information on your device.

So,

Cyberstalking comes in many forms. Sometimes, it is just following people around, keeping tabs on their social profiles, while sometimes it has sinister intentions like publicizing the intimate information of the victims.

Regardless, cyber stalking is always a real threat, and it should be dealt with promptly. Check out the signs of cyberstalking and if you feel you have a cyber stalker on your tail, then use the above-mentioned preventive measures to keep these threats at bay.

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