Hackers can listen into your skype calls, ask mark zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg covers up his laptop’s camera with a little piece of tape. After he posted a photo of himself at a desk this summer celebrating Instagram’s growing popularity, online commenters seized on the
little gray strip above his laptop screen. “You Should Consider It, Too,” read a headline on the NewyorkTimes calling Zuckerberg’s move a “basic and cheap security safeguard.”

But new research suggests hackers can eavesdrop on those video calls, too, when you think you and the person you’re talking to are the only ones on the line.

Patrick Wardle, the director of research at a cybersecurity company called Synack, showed how hackers might do this at a cybersecurity conference called Virus Bulletin on Thursday. (Wardle used to work for NASA and the National Security Agency.) He calls the technique 'piggybacking'.

In this diagram, “!detected” means “undetected,” and “exfil” is short for exfiltrate, or extract. (Courtesy of Patrick Wardle)

As a side project, Wardle creates free Mac utilities that protect computers from the security problems he discovers. To make video piggybacking harder, he created a program called Oversight which displays a notification every time a program starts recording via the webcam. If the notification says Skype wants access, you can click “Allow.” If a fishy-sounding program is trying to access the camera, or if a second notification pops up while you’re already on a video call, you can hit “Deny” to shut it down.

In the meantime, keep covering up those webcamsEven the FBI director does it and consider downloading a utility like Oversight that can tell you whether or not you’re alone on your next video call.