For Data Privacy Day, Cybrosys Technologies writes:
So you own a webcam? Good! Welcome to being watched then.
Cyber crime is a fascinating field: constantly evolving, and always innovating. Meet its most latest brain child: hacking webcams without even the owner knowing!
The idea is simple: they turn on your webcam and watch you. Oh no, you will not be asked to pose or say cheese. They simply capture away pictures and videos of yours or anything in the webcam’s field, when you go about doing stuff, blissfully unaware.
Switching off your cam is not going to help either. The webcam hacking spyware works with a Trojan backdoor software that will turn on the web cam on its own. This can be installed in your system when you download innocent-looking picture or video or music files.
Read more on Cybrosys. Although they mention “studies” about this problem, I see no studies mentioned – just some news reports describing cases where people didn’t know they were being monitored via their webcams, including the Lower Merion case. But the article may inspire some people to shield their webcam lens if they’re not really using it.