Is Webcam Safe?

Webcams may let you stay in touch with friends and family,, but they also pose risks of people hacking into them and spying on you. A reccent lawsuit accused a school district of using webcams on school-issued laptops to spy on students and their families. And in China, a sophisticated network of hackers known as GhostNet has cracked 1,295 webcams in 103 countries. Now that makes me feel a bit uncomfortable.
 
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just getting ready to find a post from another site and checked here first again. you already said it. one in mich going on or getting ready to happen. i think laptop's on loan from the school and could be accessed with webcam for identification.
Problem was it was being views while in there daily routine and other purposes.
 
Ahem... *Raises hand* I.. through some ways.. have turned on people's webcams just to see what's going on. It isn't that hard at all to do.

But since the ways of doing it are slightly illegal I'm not willing to say how or what to even Google.

Just know that it can be done without any detection of any software. And I'm not talking about remote connection or teamviewer either. The best 'solution' is to keep a strip of tape over your webcam and never remove it until you want to use your cam.
 
Egon said:
Ahem... *Raises hand* I.. through some ways.. have turned on people's webcams just to see what's going on. It isn't that hard at all to do.

But since the ways of doing it are slightly illegal I'm not willing to say how or what to even Google.

Just know that it can be done without any detection of any software. And I'm not talking about remote connection or teamviewer either. The best 'solution' is to keep a strip of tape over your webcam and never remove it until you want to use your cam.
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There is no zero day exploit out there that does it. Almost all access to machines remotely to activate any hardware what-so-ever is done through some sort of malicious software. Typically installed by the end user by some social engineering or them visiting malicious sites that elevate code from basic programming flaws like stack over flows and such developers still can't seem to fix (well bad developers), or from something embedded in pirated software.

You also can detect what is running on your system, the problem is you have to know what to look for. Everything in Windows, OS X, or Linux has a process (service) name and is taking up resources.

So, as long as you execute "best practices," on your computer and have decent up-to-date software for security you most likely will not succumb to such an attack of having your webcam controlled. If you are that paranoid perhaps you should stop using Windows, or just put a band-aid over the web cam itself like I previously mentioned.
 
The problem is is that all anti-whatever software needs to know the program name or part of the code to be able to stop it. If it doesn't know then most likely you don't either. The only way to find out then is to stop the process. But even then if it look legal and that it should be there most of the time it will be ignored.

It comes down to this. If you install something check to see if your start-up process list had any new items.
 
Get a webcam that has a power-up light when it's active? My buddy has one of them Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000's an it has an orange dim light on it that only comes on when it's active.
 
Egon said:
The problem is is that all anti-whatever software needs to know the program name or part of the code to be able to stop it. If it doesn't know then most likely you don't either. The only way to find out then is to stop the process. But even then if it look legal and that it should be there most of the time it will be ignored.

It comes down to this. If you install something check to see if your start-up process list had any new items.
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Yes, and if you go back to my original point on this post, which is if you use best practices you won't have to worry.

Use strong passwords

Up to date OS and security software

Use smart web browsing (don't go to malicious sites)

don't install or use non legit software


MY PC has been virus free for years and years because of these methods.
 
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