Miss Teen USA spied on via MacBook camera while indicator light was off. (2013)

9to5mac.com

9 points·zamnos··3 comments

The relevant part - even back in 2013, the exploit was only reproducible on Macbooks released prior to 2008.

Direct quote from the article:

> Researchers at Johns Hopkins University were able to replicate the exploit, demonstrated in the above video, but only on MacBook and iMac models released before 2008.

I always thought the indicator light was directly wired in series with the camera, so it shouldn't be possible to use the camera without supplying current to the light?

Here is the actual paper[0] the article is referencing.

Check the "Conclusions and future work" section specifically. The authors say that the correct way to prevent manual disabling of the camera LED indicator is by using a hardware solution.

Which makes me believe that the hardware solution you are referencing was simply not a thing in pre-2008 models (which the paper is talking about) and got added later.

P.S. Found this old reddit thread[1], saying that starting with the 2009 model, the official specs started calling out the hardwired LED indicator, so I assume that 2009 was the year it got introduced. Which aligns with the timeline of the research paper.

0. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...

1. https://reddit.com/r/apple/comments/5kg6hf/is_the_webcam_led...

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