* This article was written in collaboration with Ringle.
Have you ever imagined someone watching you on the other side of your laptop? I picture unknown peepers staring at me all the time whenever I see the camera on my computer. As a cybersecurity journalist, I learned early in my career that web cameras, or webcams, are easy targets for hackers to use to creep into one’s personal space.
By webcams, I mean every camera that is connected to the internet. They include not only laptop cameras but also diverse kinds of internet protocol (IP) cameras that are installed to monitor the insides of houses. For example, pet cameras have gained huge popularity over the past several years, attracting pet owners who want to safeguard their pets when they are away from home. Wallpads, which are embedded in living rooms in South Korean apartments, are another example of webcams.
As useful as the tiny hole in a webcam is for remote meetings and control, it poses immense threats of exposing the most sensitive parts of our lives when it is not taken care of properly. Public awareness of webcam security first started to increase after a picture of Mark Zuckerberg was uploaded on Facebook in 2016. Behind the smiling face of the social media magnate, who was celebrating 500 million monthly active users on Instagram, his laptop camera was spotted covered with tape.
While some people called him paranoid, there have been countless real-life cases regarding hacked webcams and privacy exposure. In 2018, a 45-year-old man and nine other suspects were arrested for peeking into 4,900 women’s houses by hacking IP cameras. The suspects were able to remotely adjust the angles of the victims’ cameras so that they could videotape private moments of their targets. Similar incidents are still occurring. In September of last year, a male in his twenties was convicted for hacking IP cameras and recording 7,000 illicit videos of other people’s homes.
Wallpads also caused South Koreans to panic lately. At the end of 2021, I received a tip from an anonymous source who sent me an email regarding privacy exposure through wallpads in South Korea. Once I visited the underground forum that my source directed me to and saw thousands of people’s private scenes uploaded onto hackers’ channels, I could confirm the legitimacy of the tip. It further shocked me when I went on researching vulnerable webcams which were wide open to unspecified users online. I still remember the intensity of the shock that I had felt while watching other people’s faces in various parts of the world through those websites as I finished up the reporting at my desk.
However, I don’t want to frighten you too much about this because there are simple ways to prevent those threats. Most breaches regarding webcams happen due to the failure to change the default passwords of IP cameras. Webcams usually come to the market with the password “0000,” waiting for their owners to change them. When you don’t change this default password, you are very likely to be the next victim of webcam hacking. Moreover, you can always check the light of your webcam to see if it is active or not. Updating webcam software regularly is one of the best practices for you to protect your privacy. The best habit that you can develop is to cover your webcams when you are not using them.
Previous article with Ringle: [101] Forgot Password? How to manage passwords properly
