Who’s watching you? The nagging feeling that your webcam might be spying on you is not paranoia: someone may be.

For plugin webcams and microphones, it’s best to unplug when not in use, as once hacked these can become a dangerous weapon in the hands of cyber criminals.

‘Built in’ integrated webcams, like those found on laptops and other portable devices are more difficult to secure, as many do not even include a safety light displaying when the camera is recording, and there’s no guarantee this will indeed light if your webcam is hacked anyway.

The obvious solution (if you don’t intend to use your webcam or microphone) is to place a small piece of electrical tape over it (Mark Zuckerberg Style) and block the view of any potential snoopers. For a slightly neater solution, Ebay will sell you a correctly sized Webcam Sticker for around £3.

However if you actually need to use your webcam, this will quickly become inconvenient and messy.

If you instead wish to Monitor your webcam against intrusion, ESET security sofware for Windows is a smart purchase. Newer versions, such as the excellent ESET Internet Security, include webcam security, allow you to set rules for when your webcam can be accessed and notifying you if a program attempts to access it.

For Mac Users, a free webcam and microphone monitoring tool named Oversight can be a useful free addition. This handy software is one of Objective-See’s set of Mac security products aimed at giving users visibility over what processes their Mac is running.

As we’ve noted before, smartphones bring a huge number of security risks, including both a personal microphone which is constantly listening on Android and iOS, GPS tracking of your location, frequent connection to public WiFi networks and often both front and rear-facing cameras.

The safest bets here are the obvious ones: invest in a smartphone antivirus software, keep your phone’s contents locked behind a PIN code, don’t install unknown apps and don’t connect to any unknown WiFi networks which might give hackers an access route for your microphone or camera(s.)

On Android you can also review your phone’s audio recordings and GPS tracking of your location for Google via Google My Activity and Google Location History.

Stay safe!

For IT security advice and assistance, contact Lineal today.