Whether it is necessary to seal web cameras on laptops.
Stickers and slides are used in order to reduce anxiety about perverts watching your every move. After all, even the FBI Director says he's sealing a camera on his laptop.
Over the past five years, the technology industry has been making cameras for our devices better and better. With the development of the era of video surveillance, an entire industry to combat surveillance has emerged. The market is replete with cheap stickers and branded plastic slides that you can close the front camera on your phone, laptop and even on the TV.
For a long time, security researchers have shown that a hacker can hack into the camera and watch any person on the other side of the lens. To assess the potential threat, imagine what your own device's camera might have captured.
I must say that the warnings finally found their audience. In the past, FBI Director James Comey told the audience, "I'm taping the camera because I've seen a smarter person do the same."
Offers a range of accessories against surveillance.
The American company that sells various products for offices, Idea Stage Promotions, describes its device for closing webcam Cover 1.0: "the hottest item for advertising on the market."
For example, the cable channel USA Networks sent journalists such an accessory with the inscription Mr Robot as an advertisement for the new season of the popular hacker series.
Closing the lens of the webcam-not a new invention and has long been known to those who know that the Internet is watching you constantly. Political analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation Eva Galperin says that since the acquisition of her first MacBook Pro with a built-in camera in the screen in 2007, she constantly closes her eye.
The EFF organization started printing its own stickers in 2013. They also sell and hand out stickers that say," these removable stickers are anti-tracking technology that can't be hacked." The eff speaker said about this that people buy them all the time.
So the fear of Webcams is deeply rooted in pop culture. The trailer for the new biopic "Snowden" directed by Oliver stone includes the moment when actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, playing the protagonist, during an intimate moment with his girlfriend nervously looking at the webcam.
I wonder if it's just paranoia?
We know that it is not just about fiction. In 2013, researchers showed how to activate the webcam of a MacBook laptop without turning on the indicator. It couple said that the hacker had uploaded the video as they have sex, after he hacked into their smart TV. According to Federal court records, the FBI knows how to use a laptop camera to spy on users. And where there is fear – there is something to make money, is not it?
The Washington firm CamPatch describes itself as "Mercedes-Benz in the area of closing the camera with tape." The founders created a start-up in 2013 after I heard the briefing of the Pentagon devoted to cyber security. "Experts talked about Webcams how about the new "attack vector"," says generally Director CamPatch Christy Caraballo.
According to Caraballo, the company has produced more than 250 thousand patches. The wholesale price of the product is us $ 2.79. Speaking of income, Caraballo mentioned six-digit numbers.
However, not all succumbed to paranoia. Brian Pascal, a privacy expert who worked for Stanford and Palantir Technologies, believes that without proper threat modeling, such methods are excessive.
Others have not yet reached this hand. So, an expert in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, Matthew green says he didn't close the camera eye because "he's an idiot." "I have no excuse why I don't take this seriously. I just decided ultimately that seeing me naked was punishment enough."
Webcam paranoia seems to be just the beginning. Consumers are buying new devices that can become surveillance tools.