It doesn't take much these days to make you feel like you're living in Orwell's 1984.
Our smart speakers are listening to us, Facebook isn't being very careful with our data,
and what about those little cameras on all of our computers and phones?
Are they spying on us without us even knowing it? Well, it might not be something that you think of regularly,
but there definitely have been instances of webcam hacking where people were spied on
in compromising situations, and as you may have guessed, it's often not easy to tell if this is
happening to you. So to find out more, we reached out to Troy Hunt, famous for creating the website
Have I Been Poned, and we'd like to thank him for his contributions to this video.
So, there are a few tricks that you can use to see if your webcam has been activated without
your consent. A pretty obvious tell is if that light that's attached to the webcam turns on
unexpectedly. Though you probably don't need us to tell you that the wrinkle in that whole plan
is that the absence of a light doesn't necessarily mean that no one is watching.
You see, while some webcams have a light that is hardwired into the circuitry and that will
always turn on if there's a signal being sent through the camera itself,
many others have a light that is in fact software-driven, meaning that a skilled hacker could
turn the light on and off at will. And making matters worse, it's very difficult to figure out
which kind of light your webcam has. However, not every trick that hackers use to spy on you is
super elegant, so do pay attention if the light does come on unexpectedly when you open your
web browser or launch an unrelated program. The culprit might be a compromised browser extension
or application that you may be able to simply remove easily. Other, less well-designed pieces of
malware can leave traces on your PC. For example, some of them will leave copies of recorded video
somewhere on your hard drive, often in the default folder that recordings are saved to,
so be sure to check for videos that you don't remember recording if you think someone might
be watching you. There is some good news, though. It's actually becoming harder and harder to
accidentally get infected by malware that will spy on you through your webcam. Back when applets
like Java and Flash were far more common in browsers, it was easier to fall victim to malware
of this type, including spyware that could potentially take over your webcam. And it could
happen simply by visiting an infected website. These days, because of these security concerns,
Java and Flash are far less common. Plus, operating systems are automatically patched quite
frequently. And the more walled-garden nature of mobile operating systems makes it even more
difficult to pick up malware passively on devices like those. Instead, social engineering
reliant attacks that rely on tricking the user into revealing information on their own,
like phishing, or remote access trojans are more common ways to have your webcam compromised.
Remote access trojans, which allow a bad actor to control a user's computer over the internet,
are quite common in tech support scams, which you can actually learn more about right here.
Additionally, hackers that focus on getting into webcams tend to do it in a more target-specific
manner, which makes sense if you think about it. Cyber criminals who are out to steal financial
information often try to cast a very wide net and get the account information of as many victims
as possible. But webcam spying is often motivated by a perpetrator's desire to surveil a particular
target, maybe a business rival, or a former lover, or a celebrity who they think they might
be able to blackmail. That means that you could fall victim to a targeted phishing attack,
or even have surveillance software installed on your machine when you aren't looking.
Now, that isn't to say that there haven't been instances of hackers attempting to spy on people
at random just to satisfy some voyeuristic tendency, or even sell the footage on online
black markets. But the bottom line is, just be careful about what kind of enemies you make,
or if you think that people are after you, all it takes is a small piece of cardboard over your
webcam, and no one will be able to look through it. I guess that really is the bottom line of this
one, isn't it? So thanks for watching guys, like, dislike, check out our other videos,
leave a comment if you have a suggestion for a future Fast as Possible, and don't forget to subscribe.