After the sensational case of Miss Teen USA’s nude photos unfolded, a team of US researchers demonstrated how a webcam of your Apple McBook can take your pictures without its LED indicator being turned on.
If you are one of those who think that no one can see you when you have closed all the doors and windows of your house, you are mistaken. A recent study reveals that your laptop’s webcam can be hacked in a way that you won’t even realize if your pictures are being taken.
After the sensational case of Miss Teen USA’s nude photos unfolded, a team of US researchers demonstrated how a webcam of your Apple McBook can take your pictures without its LED indicator being turned on.
Stephen Checkoway and Matthew Broker from Johns Hopkins University noted that Apple’s webcam LED indicator can be bypassed by hacking the operating of the chip inside the MacBook webcam.
The method is divided in two parts to complete the hacker’s job. The first part takes care of disabling the LED indicator of the iSight webcams used in some MacBook laptops and iMac desktop computers.
While the second part enables the camera to capture video and still pictures without giving any visual indications and keeping the cam controls away from the user of the device.
“The same technique that allows us to disable the LED, namely reprogramming the firmware that runs on the iSight, enables a virtual machine escape whereby malware running inside a virtual machine reprograms the camera to act as a USB Human Interface Device (HID) keyboard which executes code in the host operating system,” the researchers noted.
It should noted that Miss Teen USA 2013, Cassidy Wolf received her nude photographs in an anonymous email asking her to send more of her nude pictures to not release the pictures online. The pictures were apparently collected over several months. Wolf, who was crowned with her biggest achievement in this August, says that she never notice her laptop’s webcam LED flashing during that duration.
The FBI has already arrested the suspect named Jared Abrahams was using a malicious software to peep into many Apple users’ personal space. Abrahams has already pleaded guilty to the charges of extortion. Including Wolf, Abrahams was keeping more than 150 ‘slave’ computers in the vicinity.
The spying software that hacks webcams is not new as FBI has also accepted that its elite hacker team designed a malicious program to spy on its suspects. FBI’s ‘malware’ also has the same function that used to cut the LED indicator from the webcam.
We still don’t know which laptop is bugged with what kind of malware, but when a report of this kind has come out I personally would put a black tap on my webcam.
