Web Cams – Big Brother Could Be Watching

So you get a web cam to enhance your internet experience. You hope it will allow you to more interactively communicate with family, friends, or acquaintances. The web cam sits on your desk, activated only when you use your video email or IM program, and otherwise you give it very little thought. Well, the problem is, maybe you should give it thought. Your web cam could be watching you.

Computer companies are becoming more and more concerned over viruses that have the ability to use web cams and microphones that are attached to the infected machines in order to spy on the users. These viruses can be used at home, work, or even in schools. There are an increasing number of hackers who are interested in spying on the victims of their viruses. These viruses, and the subsequent spying, open up companies to industrial espionage and homes to cyber peeping toms. These people are doing the equivalent of looking right in through your window or even sitting in your closet as you go about your daily routines. What’s more, your company could be exposed to all sorts of espionage and sabotage. Your meetings can be recorded, your moves and discussions can be seen, and all of it can happen without you or your co-workers’ knowledge. Privacy reaches everywhere, and these viruses can do the same, which essentially takes away privacy all together.

If your computer is infected with one of these viruses, your privacy is essentially gone. If your web cam is plugged into the infected computer, then everything you do, every move you make in front of that web cam can be seen, everything you say can be recorded, and the information is out of your control once the hacker has it. Imagine your family squabbles, your meeting about the company’s newest invention, or simply the audio from a conversation you had in private being posted and broadcast on the internet? It could happen with these new viruses.

Such a worm with backdoor Trojan functionality spreads over your computer network a number of ways. The most prevalent, though, is via weak passwords and the exploitation of several windows vulnerabilities. The greatest espionage use of the virus is in stealing passwords and product keys from a number of games and applications as confidential information. Most of these viruses also leave machines and PCs vulnerable to remote control. The only good news is that these viruses are still fairly rare, though novel and growing in popularity.

These viruses are not completely new. There have been a number of web cam Trojan viruses in the past. However, the web cam exploitation is becoming a growing problem. With the increase in connectivity of and popularity of web cams, the viruses will begin to happen more and more regularly. Though there are a number of machines out there that regularly are infected, the real weak link is humans. Many mistakenly link to bad sites or run programs that they shouldn’t, and they do it way too often.

The virus makes use of traditional mal ware methods of exposing security to make it vulnerable. The worm will not only take control of the web cams and microphones, but will send the images and files back to the hackers for storage. In addition, the mal ware writer will have access to information on the machine’s hard drive, steal passwords, and even initiate the denial-of-service attacks. There have already been a few hundred versions of the virus.

One way to figure out that your computer has been infected is by looking at your web cam. If you have the feature of an “activity light,” it should not be lit during times you are not using it. If the light is on, the cam is active. There are a lot of web cams, however, that do not have this feature. In the case of those, there is really only one thing you can do to protect your privacy, aside from good anti-virus software. You should unplug and put away your web cam and microphone when you are not using them. Only by keeping them disconnected can you definitely keep these increasingly smart hackers out of your home or business.

Web cams can be fun and enjoyable. As you can see, they can also be a tool for incredibly intrusive privacy breaches. It is important that you know what is out there and protect yourself from these dangerous viruses.