Is my Mac spying on me?

Feel free to call me crazy or paranoid, but sometimes I feel like the camera LED turns on briefly (for approximately 0.1 seconds). Maybe it's just odd reflections, or me confusing the LED for the camera itself with my peripheral vision, but it piqued my curiosity; how would I find out if some utility is turning on and off the camera very quickly to snap a picture? Is it even possible to do it that quickly? How would I diagnose this? Does something like this actually exist?

Edit: Note, yes, I do know of the existence of trojans and so on. The point of my question is: as a sysadmin-level user (advanced), how can I perform this diagnostic, hard core? Also, the question about the timing is: when the camera is turned on by any utility, is it possible to turn it on, snap a picture, and turn it off in such a small amount of time? Does the driver allow you such a quick round trip?

Solution 1:

If you've ever used Photo Booth, or any other app using your built-in camera as a source, you may know that there's no way anything less than 1 second is fast enough. There is a very obvious warm-up time in order for the camera to actually warm up and provide an image. Although the problem with timing Photo Booth is that it has to open the app, draw the window, then fire up the camera somewhere in there.

As a matter of testing, I opened up Quicktime Player (Quicktime X) and let it settle down, then I hit File -> New Movie Recording. Luckily for me, the image didn't fire up right away because the built-in camera for my laptop was chosen, but I have the lid closed using an external screen also with a built-in camera.

So I changed the input source to the external camera, and pressed start on my stopwatch as soon as the green LED lit up (which was pretty much immediately). The video started displaying at about 1.5 seconds in. That's still certainly within "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" territory, but only barely.

My answer is that I'm suggesting stray light may be reflecting off of area the LED resides in, invoking an "illuminated" feeling, but that nothing may be happening in reality.

However, I don't suggest that you do nothing. Commercial vendors such as Sophos offer Antivirus products of OS X, Lion-compatible and free too in Sophos' case, and I've also used ClamXAV as a one-off scan-on-demand utility when I've had similar feelings (or when I've wanted to check a file for a windows-using friend, etc.).

Note also that OS X does have built-in spyware protection named, "XProtect", that was born out of the "MacDefender" trojan scare. TUAW has many great articles on the subject under the security tag.

Solution 2:

To answer your question, yes it is possible to turn the camera on momentarily and take snaps without the user knowing - apps like Hidden take advantage of this to protect your Mac from theft.

Solution 3:

Such things do exist. They are known as Trojans. However, Trojans are rare on Mac OS X, and unless you are an avid downloader of torrents or illegal material, chances are you don't have any. If you're really paranoid, Norton can check for viruses, including Trojans and Bots. As well, if you legitimately believe that your Mac is taking pictures, cover up the camera with a post-it note or something similar when it's not in use.

Solution 4:

Yes, it certainly is possible. That light is just a UI convenience, so that we users can feel that we know when the camera is on.

Note: My cam LED never comes on in the fashion you describe.

You can disable the camera. Use one of the NSA hardening guides found on this page. Seriously, how often do you use your camera? Just unload the drivers and see where the new error messages show up. Virus scanning is a good idea, so is a clean re-install, but perhaps better to disable the camera and see what else happens.