Beware of Malware that can affect your WebCam

The first Web camera, commonly known as a ‘webcam’, was created in 1991 at the University of Cambridge as a security system for two electronic engineers to know who emptied the computer science department’s coffee maker. XCoffee was perfected and in 1992 it was released under the name XCam, the first webcam in history. From here, and especially with the boom of the home Internet in the late 90’s and the emergence of the first social networks and video-conferences, webcams became such a popular tool that all user teams, and that had great popularity.

As we saw that they gained a lot of popularity, these were not only received by people who use them for the media, unfortunately hackers or cybercriminals use them to spy, but then… how do these malicious software get to our devices? Through emails. If you receive an email saying that you have won a prize of a huge amount of money, one of two: either you have won the lottery and you have all the luck in the world, or it is a virus. So the best thing is that you delete those messages that you judge suspicious. Another way to get infected, among many others, is when you download movies illegally.

What can happen if the Webcam is infected with malware

Let’s take Camfecting for example, this consists of taking control of our computer’s webcam by making everything that appears in front of the camera, at any time, could be seen in real time by unwanted people, as long as the device is turned on and connected to the Internet. There are several ways to identify that we are being victims of Camfecting:

▸The webcam is working without us having opened any app

▸The webcam process is running without your permission

▸The webcam is active and it is also making sounds or movements such as focusing or zooming.

▸There are recording files in the System Pictures and Videos folder that you should not

Check also:
What are Trojans and how do they affect us?
Threats that the Mac OS system is facing

---