A word of warning to MacBook owners: Beware of what you do in front of your laptop camera, for you never know who could be watching. Two Johns Hopkins University researchers uncovered a loophole in Apple's iSight system that allowed them to hack into some versions of MacBook laptops and iMac desktops and disable the webcam indicator LED. It sounds harmless, but the discovery essentially turns your computer into a peephole for hackers — like the one who spied on 19-year-old Miss Teen USA, Cassidy Wolf. In a paper titled "iSeeYou: Disabling the MacBook Webcam Indicator LED," Matthew Brocker and Stephen Checkoway described the process of reprogramming an iSight camera's microcontroller to disable the LED activation light, and eavesdrop on an unsuspecting user. "Our results in this paper demonstrate that, at least in some cases, people have been correct to worry about malware covertly capturing images and video," Checkoway and Brocker wrote. "We show a vulnerability in the iSight webcam that affects a particular range of Apple computers … that can be exploited to turn on the camera and capture images and video without the indicator illuminating." By doing so, the team was able to capture video and photos unbeknownst to the person in front of the computer's camera. Read more here --> pcmag.com
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