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3 Signs Your Computer’s Webcam Might Have Been Hacked

One more sign of a webcam hacking is inexplicable recordings being saved to your computer. In other words, the camera might be hacked if you find video files recorded off of your webcam that you don’t remember making or saving yourself. Where you’ll find these files depends on which program is hypothetically being used to access your webcam in the first place, but there are a few spots you can check pretty easily.

  1. In Windows, photos and videos recorded from the webcam are saved by default in the Camera Roll folder.
  2. On a Mac, Photo Booth (the built-in default camera recording app) videos and photos are saved in the Photo Booth folder. You can find it by opening the Documents folder and, clicking on the Photos folder, then opening the Photo Booth folder.
  3. For either operating system, if you know the file naming format used by the default programs, you can also use the built-in search function to locate them.

However, files may end up in a different spot if you’ve ever changed the app’s default save location. Similarly, it’s not outside the realm of possibility for hackers to save files in a different location, use a different file naming convention than the default, or simply not save the files at all and live stream the video instead.