That well publicized story about a school spying on students through web cameras on school issued laptops raises some network security issues. Supposedly, they were able to activate the cameras remotely.
I have a web-cam here and there is no way I could access through it through the internet without setting up port forwarding and port triggering on my home network router. Even at that, the camera needs to communicate with a server that tracks my dynamic IP address. I'm not sure how that works either because I would think the ISP assigned address would not be known past the router input port. How can they crash through firewalls and network translation provided by routers?
It would be scary to believe the software planted within the school owned computer could find routers, circumvent passwords, open ports or set up firewall holes.
Of course, the camera can be triggered by some local activity such as visiting a certain website causing a picture to be sent to a server where it could be retrieved. But by all accounts, the system was controlled remotely.
--- CHAS
I have a web-cam here and there is no way I could access through it through the internet without setting up port forwarding and port triggering on my home network router. Even at that, the camera needs to communicate with a server that tracks my dynamic IP address. I'm not sure how that works either because I would think the ISP assigned address would not be known past the router input port. How can they crash through firewalls and network translation provided by routers?
It would be scary to believe the software planted within the school owned computer could find routers, circumvent passwords, open ports or set up firewall holes.
Of course, the camera can be triggered by some local activity such as visiting a certain website causing a picture to be sent to a server where it could be retrieved. But by all accounts, the system was controlled remotely.
--- CHAS
