Her Post About A Cyber Bully Went Viral. Meet Facebook's New Heroine

What if a stranger contacted you online and told you they had hacked into your personal account and had access to all your private photos and videos? How would you react if they threatened to leak that information to your friends, family and colleagues unless you did as they said? Here's a lesson in how to handle blackmail of this sort - this happened to an Indian woman living in USA and she is now Facebook's new heroine for her 'publish and be damned' approach.

"Instead of cowering down," Taruna Aswani has shared a moving post addressed to friends and family explaining that her cloud account had been hacked and several private photos and videos had been accessed. The hacker, allegedly male, had threatened to make the content public but Ms Aswani was choosing to fight back by sharing her story and asking for help in identifying the alleged blackmailer. Her post, shared on October 22, has received over 17,000 reactions and more than 3,800 shares.

"I have in the last 24 hours received 2 emails from someone that claims to know me that has hacked into my google cloud back up. He has been threatening to release some private pictures and videos of me to my friends family and colleagues," Taruna Aswani says on Facebook.

Ms Aswani even attached screenshots of the emails, hoping people would help in "nabbing this sick pervert."

"As embarrassing as the videos may be ( they were sent to my boyfriend at the time ) I choose to stand up to this man. Instead of cowering down to his requests. I do this so that other women may take a lesson to stand up to bullies and low life's like this and may get the confidence to stand up as well in case he is known to us and is targeting all of us, but we're either too scared, ashamed or clueless in how to manage or handle such situations," she says.

Several people on Facebook have posted comments describing Ms Aswani as 'brave' and praising her for standing up against cyber bullies.
 
In 2014, the accounts of several female celebrities - among them Jennifer Lawrence and Rihanna - were hacked and private photographs circulated online. Ms Lawrence described the hack and subsequent revealing of her personal pictures as a 'sex crime' in an interview with Vanity Fair.

Click here to read Ms Aswani's post in its entirety.