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Practical first steps and the organisations that can act. FISRO is a research organisation, not an emergency, law-enforcement or incident-response service.
In immediate danger? Call your local emergency number. Nothing on this page replaces the police or emergency services.
We list an organisation only after checking that its service exists and does what we describe. National listings are being added country by country; where none appear, use the international resources and your national CERT.
I need to report an immediate threat
- If anyone is in immediate physical danger, contact your local emergency number now. FISRO cannot dispatch help and does not monitor reports around the clock.
- If a child is at risk or you have found sexual images of a child, do not download, copy or forward the material: that can itself be a crime. Report it to a hotline in your country (listed below) or to the police.
- For an attack under way against an organisation’s systems, contact that organisation and your national computer emergency response team (CERT/CSIRT).
I may have been hacked
- From a device you trust, change the password of your main email account first, because it is the key to resetting everything else. Then change your other important accounts. Use a different password for each.
- Turn on two-step verification (an authenticator app or security key is stronger than SMS) and sign out of all other sessions in each account’s security settings.
- Check email forwarding rules, recovery phone numbers and connected apps for anything you did not set up, and remove it.
- If money is involved, contact your bank or payment provider immediately; speed matters for reversing transactions.
- Keep evidence such as screenshots, messages and transaction references before deleting anything. You may need it for a police report.
I found malware or a phishing site
- Do not enter any details on the suspect page and do not open unexpected attachments. If you already did, treat it as “I may have been hacked” above.
- Report phishing pages to the browser vendors’ blocklists and to the brand being imitated; most large companies run an abuse or phishing address.
- Tell FISRO through our report form. A link or domain name is enough. We use reports to follow campaigns across countries.
- If ransomware has encrypted your files, do not pay before checking whether a free decryptor exists.
My accounts or personal data were exposed
- Find out what was exposed. Breach-notification services can tell you whether your email address appears in known leaks.
- Change the password for the affected service and for anywhere else you reused it.
- Expect targeted phishing that uses the leaked details to sound convincing. Verify any request by contacting the company through its official website or app, not the link in a message.
- If identity documents or financial data were exposed, contact your bank and the authority that issued the document about monitoring or replacement.
Someone is threatening or exploiting me online
- You are not to blame, and you do not have to deal with this alone. Stop responding to the person, but do not delete the conversation: keep screenshots with usernames and dates.
- Do not pay. In sextortion cases, paying rarely ends the demands.
- Report the account to the platform, and if intimate images are involved, use the image-hashing services below to help platforms block them without you sending the images to anyone.
- If you are under 18, tell an adult you trust. Specialist services for young people are listed below.
- Contact the police: threats, extortion and sharing intimate images without consent are crimes in many countries.
Other resources
- Directory of national and sector CERTs/CSIRTs. A directory of incident-response teams worldwide, with country and contact details. Use it to find your national CERT; contacts are for incident response only.
Listing an organisation does not imply a partnership with FISRO. Spotted an outdated link? Tell us.