To think covering your work laptop camera is just paranoia?

Yay dont say 😂😂

I cover mine, there are weirdos everywhere, especially online.

I used to do surveys years ago, and I covered mine as with the name of software that one of them used I suspected that they might be using the camera to look at you. Then I’m guessing rules tightened up and they started asking permission to use the camera to see reactions (which I always refused). So I suspect I’d had good reason to be what some might call paranoid in those prior years.

Mark Zuckerberg covers his camera with tape.

Transmission Control Protocol but it's as near as damnit

and I agree with what you said about understanding. It's all bloody gobbledygook lol

Oh give over, stop catastrophising and trying to to wind people up needlessly.

we all have at least one doppelgänger and anyway, so many people post up their photos and videos on social media, if someone wanted to steal your identity they wouldn't need to go to the bother of hacking your laptop!

It only takes 7 photos of someone's face to use deep fake software. There are all manner of applications for this and reasons why criminals would want to steal or manipulate your likeness

@TealDreamer poor Edward Snowden had to become an exile in Russia over trying to blow the whistle on this - nobody knows or cares what he was trying to say.

It's not. They can.

My laptop is in my bedroom. Once, in the middle of the night, I saw the camera light go green, as if it were recording.
I jumped out of bed to close the shutter.

I don’t know if there’s an innocent explanation for the light going green, but it’s made me more aware of the possibility of being hacked and now I frequently close the shutter when not in meetings.

i use the inbuilt shutter but dont know why

This. I couldn’t live life in such paranoia

except the whole point of a camera is that when I do use it I can see what it shows! Which is my face and my face only. A laptop would have to be at an angle nearly half closed for the camera to have a view of the keyboard and therefore someone typing something in, so how would that ever work?

I think to be fair to the poster, whether they wrote TCP or Transfer Control Protocol (I think it is) wasn’t going to change your understanding of the answer 😳

My point was around perception of safety, that by locking your front door, you're safe, even though the back door is on the latch, so if a burglar wants to they can easily walk round the back and get in through the back door. This actually happened to me when my house got broken into when I first moved many years ago, they jimmy'd off the old insecure slidey patio door. So I thought I'd locked up and went off for the weekend without a care in the world, when actually my house was simple to break into and they got in and did untold damage.

in the example of the camera, people think they are increasing their security /privacy by taping over the camera lens, yes, the hacker can't see them but as I said upthread, if a hacker has managed to infiltrate your computer, then the camera being taped over with a bit of cello tape is the least of your problems. they'll be doing a lot more damage, just like those burglars did to my house.

back to my recommendation, if anything gives cause for concern on a work laptop, then report it asap. One hopes that professional IT is well protected, but as we always say in Cyber Security the number 1 risk to security is People!

I work in IT (not claiming to know everything) and anyone who does will tell you - no data is safe, nothing ever gets deleted permanently and everything is hackable. Take no chances.
Both my kids laptops have camera stickers, mine has a shutter but is in my office so I rarely use the shutter.

How are contact books and diary entries transmitted by a camera?

Ask your IT department

It's not stored data being stolen. It's transmitted data.

OK, so if the firewall and Internet security isn't enough to protect my camera, and you're advising that I cover it up, what extra measures can/should I take to protect the rest of the stuff on my laptop please?

Would they not need access to the computer to steal data stored on it? Surely the camera doesn’t store anything? It’s ‘dumb’, isn’t it?

We don't have an alarm at home because the thieves would be pretty depressed if they bothered to break in only to find a slightly damaged 15 year old TV and an ancient playstation thing. ...and that's if they made their way past the piles of Lego and footballs ... )

Likewise I don't bother covering my camera because anyone would hacked in would just see me drinking coffee and typing furiously and I imagine would get bored eventually

Why have anyone work in cybersecurity at all if a single firewall and some software stops everything?

Why have an alarm if you lock your doors?

If I have a decent firewall and Internet security on my work and home laptops, why isn't that enough? If I trust the firewall etc to keep everything else on the laptop safe, why wouldn't I trust it to keep the camera safe?

Hacking into the camera can allow them to do other things. Access your calender and contacts for example. Personal data has value.

They can also use it to alter the pathway of transmission when you are using it. Including making an unauthorised device appear legitimate on your network.

They can of course do this while you are using it too, especially if you use hotspots or unsecured public WiFi at train stations, cafes etc.