How to prevent Hackers from taking over your webcam

Hi guys,

I m from Belgium. There s been a lot of paranoia in my small country.
What s the paranoia about : Hackers taking over people webcams and sneeking into your livingroom.
Them folks hack into laptops and desktops also.
Even our police use paperstick that they paste over their webcams so they sure not being privatized.

How can i prevent people taking over my laptops webcam people ask me now.

My answer is disable the webcam service in your services.

Am i right here or is this not a full protection.

I wonder if even our police are so paranoid

Any tips are welcome

Shouts out to this forum for being here

If you practice good computing habits and run a quality malware scanner, you have little to worry about.

Put a piece of tape over the lens if it's a built-in webcam, or unplug the webcam, when your not using it, if it's an add-on type.

John

I use File hippo update checker to check if my software is updated
as a firewall i have comodo free firewall
I have MS security essentials as a antivirus
also i use Winpatrol and Super antispywar free edition
and i run cc cleaner daily
I hope to be okay
Regards and thank you very much

Thank you all for your answers!!

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
Step out of line, the man come and hack your webcam.

A little paranoia can be a good thing, keeps you alert. AV software, a firewall, stay away from the pron and warez sites, you should be good to go.

Thanks everybody for the updates
I heard that it is possible to disable the webcame service via msconfig.
This should do it also no ?
And it feels better then taping my webcam

The webcam is not a service, is a device driver that you can disable though device manager, so programs cannot detect and use it. Second best option would be to use a firewall to protect outgoing connections, so that even if something actually uses the cam, it cannot "phone home" the images back. Of course, an antivirus may be of some help in preventing those from getting in in the first place.

But the real problem is, basically, that any solution that you can do in software, a virus can potentially revert it, be it disabling the webcam, firewall, antivirus. If something sneaks in with enough permissions, it can disable every security solution you have, at least theoretically (and somewhat paranoid on my part too). That's why the tape is recommended. No matter what, it cannot be "disabled" remotely, someone has to physically go to the computer to remove it. The same to unplugging the cam.