Why You Should Cover Your Laptop Camera? You Are Being Watched
Believe it or not the big internet security story is the fact that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, puts tape over his webcam. This is all due to a Instagram post where he has a picture kind of congratulating Instagram but viewers noticed that in the background was a laptop with tape over the webcam and also apparently maybe tape over the microphone ports of the laptop as well.
Here is the original snap
Let's zoom a bit and try to spot those masking tapes
Now this forced the security community talking about this advice of taping up your webcam. A lot of people think that doing so is kind of overly paranoid, well you might believe that security agencies can spy on laptops but is anyone really going to actually spy on your laptop?
Well believe it or not I would suggest taping up your webcams in fact I actually have a cover on my webcam as well. This is due to the fact that lots of malware has had the ability to spy on webcams for a long long time and their features was to actually turn on and record your webcam on top of that many of these malicious programs are able to turn on your webcam while still disabling the little recording light that shows you that it's on.
So, unfortunately it's really true that even hackers have easy means to use your webcam in fact a more serious threat is out there known as sextortion, where bad guys use malware to actually spy on people to actually catch them in inappropriate moments and maybe use that to extort the particular victim so really covering up your webcam is good advice.
Recently the FBI director James Comey admitted that he tapes up his webcam. so it's a suggestion that if you do have a webcam on your laptop you might want to consider covering up it.
Sometimes you use your webcam for Skype or some other application and if you want to use it more often than there are some cool webcam covers in the market that can actually close and open your webcam whenever you want.
Watch this video in which Edward Snowden talks about how NSA is spying on you, 'Government Can Access Everything On Your Cell Phone Even If It's Turned Off!'
Image Source 1,2
Using remote access to webcams on other machines is also part of the Windows OS. Has been for as long as I can remember.
You can turn the webcam off in Windows 10. In the search bar type webcam and you will see if it is on or off.
You can then select which programs are allowed to access the webcam and microphone.
This will also notify you if another program tries to access the webcam.
Hope this helps and saves people worrying. It is a real issue.
I believe anything related to software can be compromised so I would prefer to physically cover it :)
That's correct and a simple hack can get turn off the notification alerts so yeah to be completely safe cover it up. Bubble gum works well :)
This post has received a 0.67 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @netspikes.