Mark Zuckerberg Also Puts Tape Over His Webcam. Your Paranoia Is Real

The Facebook founder has tape over his webcam and audio jack on his laptop. Should you?

mark zuckerberg webcam hack

by Jess Commons |
Published on

It's safe to say that after 12 years and $18 billion, Mark Zuckerberg probably knows a thing or two about the internet.

So it is WITH UTTER PANIC THEN that we realised that your fears of being spied on by weirdos on the internet through your webcam might not be unfounded.

See, Mark Zuckerberg, just like you, puts tape over his laptop's webcam. He also goes one step further and tapes over his microphone jack.

In a picture that the 32-year-old posted on Facebook to celebrate Instagram hitting 500 million users yesterday, the tape was clearly visible on Zuckerberg's laptop.

Screen Shot 2016-06-22 at 11.00.22 AM

See? And here we were thinking we were being paranoid. But, if Mark Zuckerberg tapes over his webcam, perhaps it might actually be a bloody good idea.

The Good Wife watchers of you out there will remember they tackled this issue back in Season 5 when the Florricks' laptops were hacked. IRL, there's been plenty of high profile cases including that of Cassidy Wolf, 2013's Miss Teen USA. Cassidy's webcam was hacked by a former classmate who threatened to leak intimate pictures of her unless she agreed to send further pictures or strip for him. Gross. He was sentenced to 18 months for his crimes.

If that's not horrific enough, take the case of Stefan Rigo, a middle-aged man from Leeds who was arrested in 2014 when it emerged that he'd used the notorious Blackshades RAT malware to hack womens' laptops (most of whom he knew) to* *observe them from five to 12 hours a day. He received a 20 month suspended sentence.

Surely hacking a webcam must be super hard though right? Well, apparently not. In 2014, Blackshades was widely used and sold for as little as $40. It's creator and many users were then arrested but that doesn't mean the problem has gone away. Search 'how to hack a webcam' on Google and there's hundreds of easy to follow (for those with a little bit of technical know-how, I would struggle spectacularly) guides on how to gain access to different cameras.

So, better safe than sorry? Who knows. Probably. Tape it up kids.

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Follow Jess on Twitter @Jess_Commons

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.

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