WASHINGTON — Your laptops, tablets and smartphones all have cameras staring at you, and it is easier than ever for those cameras to be hacked. It may be a very good idea to keep them from watching you.
The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, a D.C.-based think tank, recently released a study titled “Alert: America Exposed” on the risks unsecured, internet-connected cameras pose to both national security and the private sector, as well as to individual users.
It could lead to blackmail.
“What would you do to keep compromising images of you off the internet?” James Scott, senior fellow at the ICIT, asked WTOP.
If you’re practicing what the ICIT calls poor cyber-hygiene, a camera hacker has your IP address and therefore likely your name, address, and all your friends on Facebook and other social media. And the hacker is ready to share unless you pay up.
But if you’re not doing anything wrong, what is there to worry about?
“To be a victim, you don’t have to do anything to intentionally compromise yourself. I wouldn’t want people to see me with no clothes on getting changed for work. I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m just getting ready to go do an honest days’ work,” he said.
There are high-tech ways to disable your cameras, but hackers also have ways to disable your disables. The simplest way to shut your camera’s eye is old school.
Cover it up.
“You can even do a piece of tape and a small piece of paper under there so it doesn’t leave residue on your camera. And cover up the microphone as well,” Scott said. (And both can be easily uncovered for when you really want to use the camera and microphone.)
Webcam cover maker CamPatch, which sells camera covers for about $7, donates 100 percent of its net proceeds to the nonprofit ICIT.
There is the famous picture of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg with his tape-covered laptop camera in the background, irony not lost on Scott.
“Federal agencies as a matter of national security have some kind of surveillance setup, but nobody’s talking about the ‘dragnet surveillance capitalists’ like Google and Facebook,” he said.
