Metropol

Just when you thought virus writers couldn't be any more brazen . . .

For TheRegister.co.uk, John Leyden wrote: Meet the Peeping Tom worm

By John Leyden
Published Monday 23rd August 2004 14:56 GMT

A worm that has the capability to using webcams
to spy on users is circulating across the Net.

Rbot-GR, the latest variant of a prolific worm series, spreads via network
shares, exploiting a number of Microsoft security vulnerabilities to drop a
backdoor Trojan horse program on vulnerable machines as it propagates.

:roll:
Whatever next . . . ?!?

The full article is at TheRegister . . .

trouble is though, and why this type of worm is flawed is that sending captured video and audio from a webcam would create a massive amount of traffic and a notable cpu overhead as the worm encoded and did something with the data.

you know yourself that if you have anything like a streaming server capturing live video from a camera, the increased hard disk activity is highly noticable.

this kind of traffic going down a dialup connection wouldn't work, and on a corporate network, it's bound to get noticed straight away.

a single user may fall victim to this on broadband, but still, i think most people would notice that their computer had lost some performance

I capture a lot and do notice some intense hard disc activity, depends on how it encodes though. A huffyuv AVI causes constant hard disc activity and slowdown by the shear amount of data to save to disc whereas my MPEG2 encoder causes the disc light to blink occasionally and a flashing icon in the systray

Theres a gold mine on my machine though, most times I select webcam software goes to the first video capture device avaliable (my tv card) ... another way to watch foreign TV