Am I Protected ?

[ocp1000]

Hi y'all.

I recently bought a webcam to use with MSN messenger.

A friend of mine told me that there's a rumor that your webcam can be accessed quite easliy and basicly, people can spy on you without your knowledge.

After I googled the subject it seemed that it's not as true as he thought, although a few people suggested that with the right knowledge it can be done.

My question is am I protected against the "avarage hacker" (i.e the kind the doesn't posses the knowledge to hack my webcam) ?

Thanks !

[Ocp!]

[sven]

i personally haven't heard of this. if your concerned, just turn your webcam so it faces the wall when your not using it. also, i most cams are unable to be used with more then one application, so if you have it running, it shouldn't be able to start in another program

[LLXX]

That would be very difficult to do. For someone to gain access to your webcam, either you'd have to be running a service that listens on a port and interacts with the webcam, or software on your machine that interacts with the webcam would have to initiate a connection.

So the short answer would be, No. It's difficult for someone to "hack" your webcam.

Edited January 9, 2006 by LLXX