I’m from a European country and I have recently joined your community. Here’s something I like to talk about.
About one year ago I found out that a strange guy had put up a pic of me on Facebook. The photo was completely new to me, I’d never seen it before. I realized it had been taken by my laptop’s web cam without my knowledge. I contacted Facebook and the account with my pic was taken down. It had been a an account with a fake name. I didn’t do anything more about it. I didn’t contact the police about it, I had some private stuff on my laptop that I didn’t want anyone else to see. I never used the laptop again. I bought a new one and tried to forget about it.
But I can’t forget. I keep a tape over the web cam all the time. I never ever use it. The only time the web cam’s being used is when my mother is here. Then I take the tape down and she uses it. She doesn’t understand that anybody could watch her without her consent. Besides, if the web cam is hacked again it’s a good idea that the hacker sees an elderly woman in front of it. The teenagers or creepy old men who hack web cams are mostly interested in looking at young women, if they see someone older in front of it they will hopefully lose interest and move to another one. A tip I got from a European Forum.
Of course I understand that if someone has hacked the web cam he will also have access to everything else on my laptop but that isn’t as horrifying to me as to think someone’s watching me through the camera and taking pics of me.
I wonder if anyone else here has been through the same ordeal? I know that famous people like Miss Teen USA has been the target of a web cam hacker. What people maybe not think about is that the same person had hacked up to about 150 web cams. It’s something all of us may be in danger of having to confront.
Today I do regret I didn’t contact the police, these guys deserve to get caught.
The very first thing I did when the new computer arrived was tape a piece of paper over the webcam. I’ve no use for one, and I don’t trust them not to be hacked.
I’ve told her but she doesn’t care. She thinks it’s fun to scare off a horny teenager with her appearance.
Anyway, in today’s world this is quite a common trick among internet users with web cams.
Me too now. I wish I’d known it earlier though.
It also irritates me that people have to cover their webcams with papers or tapes. Why aren’t web cams provided with shutters in the first place? That would be a very simple design feature to make for the computer manufacturers.
Many separate webcams do come with built-in shutters. I’ve not seen a shutter on a laptop, tablet, or phone though.
Whether shutters are a sensible precaution or pandering to paranoia is an interesting question. Like all else in the early internet-connected world, stuff was originally designed with little or no thought to intrusion. By 2010 the world had been disabused of that quaint notion and everything is designed with at least some eye to warding off intruders.
How would I know if my webcam has been hacked? How do I search the entire internet for hacked images? Or what if it is hacked, and the images aren’t posted anywhere?
I also taped something over it, but there really should be a way to reliably disable the camera with the OS, and anti-malware software should be able to tell if someone is trying to turn it on. Why aren’t these options available?
Mark me down as another person with something physically over my webcam. I also used to have a couple of RCA jacks cut off of an old headset that I kept plugged into the mic and headphone jacks because I am an insomniac and booting up my laptop in the middle of the night with that Windows screaming out in the night would wake up my husband. I do notice that Windows 8 doesn’t have any sort of bootup music screaching going on. I don’t know if blank jacks would keep someone from listening in even if the camera lens is covered or not …
My cable service got upgraded last week, and the installer told me that with the newer smart TVs, the kind with cams built into them so people can watch your facial expressions when you’re playing Call of Duty, one of his customers had downloaded an app that allowed him to access the cam on any of his online friends’ TVs, whether they were playing the game or not. After he set this guy up, he watched while the guy surfed around and took a look out into a bunch of different people’s living rooms. Some were watching TV, eating dinner, reading on the sofa…
I have absolutely zero idea whether or not to believe this guy. I also continue to have zero reason to ever buy one of those TVs.
Facebook’s facial recognition software probably found it for him. “Hey, is this you? Tag all your friends!”
The hackers always seem to be one step ahead of the people who develop anti-malware and anti-virus products.
The guy befriended some friends of mine on Facebook claiming he was a supporter of the same hockey club as them. One of them saw my pic on his page and notified me. The guy used a fake name, but the scary thing is that I suspect he must be one of my “friends” in real life since he knew the names of many of my friends. Or he might just have picked the names up from my comp after he’d hacked it. The problem is I will probably never know.
Several years ago had a Dell laptop with built in camera. I happened to have the computer on while i was doing other house stuff. Tv was off, house was quiet. I started hearing atmospheric noises that didn’t seem to match with my household atmosphere. (make sense?)
I narrowed it down to the living room, where my laptop was, then i heard someone quietly inhale through their nose. It wasn’t me. No one else was home. It came from my computer.
I freaked a bit. immediately shut it off. Scanned for viruses, which surprise I had. One was aRussian based virus that hacks cameras.
I still use this laptop occasionally, but I’ve kept the lens covered since then.
Thankfully no one in my household was in the habit of browsing the net while naked, so I doubt there are any provocative stills of my family floating around.
