Confusion and fear send people to Reddit for cybersecurity advice
A strange charge appears on a bank account. An email claims a package is on the way. A social media account stops accepting a password that worked yesterday. When these moments hit, many people do the same thing. They open Reddit and ask strangers for help. A new study shows how often this happens and what people ask when they do.
Researchers affiliated with Google and University College London built an analysis pipeline that sifted through 1.1 billion Reddit posts over four years to understand how users seek help.
Everyday online activity carries risk
Internet users deal with a wide range of threats to their digital privacy, safety, and security. These include account compromise and fraud carried out by cybercriminals, abuse from people they know, and data collection by online platforms. Handling these risks often falls on users who may not have the technical know-how, the right tools, or the support they need to protect themselves.
Google warns that the threat landscape heading into 2026 is being shaped by faster attacks, broader automation, and expanding use of AI. Phishing reaches more people, scam messages often look legitimate, and voice cloning is used to impersonate trusted contacts, with deception playing a larger role.
Europol identifies manipulated phone identities as a core tactic behind financial fraud and social engineering in Europe. The agency estimates annual global losses at about €850 million, with phone and text based scams accounting for most reported incidents. Three in ten people who experienced a cyberattack or scam said it began with a text message or a messaging app like WhatsApp or iMessage.
According to Malwarebytes, 74% of mobile users have encountered social engineering scams, and one in three have fallen victim.
Online abuse continues to affect millions of women and girls. Harassment, stalking, doxing, non-consensual image sharing, deepfakes, and disinformation remain widespread, supported by anonymity and weak legal protection. Only a minority of countries have laws addressing cyber harassment or cyberstalking, leaving about 1.8 billion women and girls without formal legal safeguards.
This trend also includes a sharp rise in pig butchering scams and crypto fraud.
Help seeking has become routine
The researchers reviewed a large collection of Reddit posts and applied a fine-tuned Gemini language model to identify posts where users were seeking help with digital risks. These posts were not news stories or general discussions. Each one involved a person trying to understand a problem or decide what to do.
Help seeking activity stayed relatively steady from 2021 through 2023. That pattern changed in 2024, when posting volume rose sharply. Over the final year of the study, monthly help seeking posts increased by more than 66%, reaching over 100,000 questions per month by August.
Scams generate the most questions
Scams show up more than any other topic. Many posts describe emails, texts, job offers, or websites that look convincing but trigger suspicion. Some users ask early, trying to decide whether something is legitimate. Others arrive after money or information has already been shared and want to know what damage can still be limited.
These posts often carry urgency. People want fast confirmation from someone who has seen the same thing before.
Account access failures are a major pain point
Problems with account access and protection form another large category. Users describe locked accounts, password resets that fail, recovery processes that stall, and security controls that appear ineffective.
Many posts detail repeated attempts to recover access, followed by confusion about what triggered the issue. This suggests that automated defenses and recovery workflows often lack clarity for users.
Privacy tools raise usability concerns
Questions about privacy tools and settings appear nearly as often as account issues. Users ask about VPNs, Tor, ad blockers, browser controls, and app permissions. Incogni reports that several widely used GenAI and LLM platforms collect sensitive data and pass it on to third parties, leaving users with little visibility into how their information is handled.
The study shows that users are less concerned with abstract privacy concepts and more focused on practical outcomes. They want to know whether tools work as expected, whether they interfere with services, and whether configuration choices matter.
Other risks appear consistently
Users also seek help with data exposure, suspected compromise, harassment, and platform enforcement actions such as bans or blocked transactions.
Harassment-related posts often involve stalking, abuse, or unwanted contact that crosses platforms. Platform action posts focus on accounts or payments disabled without explanation. These areas may attract fewer posts individually, but together they show that security issues extend beyond malware and fraud into safety and governance.
Uncertainty drives most posts
Researchers analyzed emotional signals in posts and found that confusion appears more than anything else. Many posts read like someone thinking out loud. Users list what they saw, what they tried, and what they do not understand. Annoyance and fear show up often, especially in posts about scams and harassment.
Questions about tools and settings tend to sound more curious than angry. Posts about abuse and fraud carry heavier emotional weight. The emotional tone helps explain why users seek explanation and reassurance alongside guidance.
Where users go depends on the problem
People ask for help across thousands of communities. There is no single place where security questions live.
Large general-purpose subreddits such as r/techsupport, r/advice, and r/legaladvice attract a wide range of questions. These spaces often serve as first stops for users who do not know where else to post.
Platform-focused communities play a different role. Subreddits tied to social networks, payment apps, and exchanges function as unofficial support forums. In some of these spaces, more than a third of all posts involve privacy, safety, or security concerns.
Highly specialized subreddits exist too. Communities focused on antivirus tools, hardware security keys, VPNs, or sextortion show very high concentrations of help-seeking posts. These groups are smaller and attract users with narrow, technical questions or specific harm experiences.
Most help seeking posts live outside these specialized spaces. More than 70% appear in low-density subreddits where digital security is not the main focus.