Miss Teen USA has recently contacted the FBI, claiming that she received two nude photos of herself by e-mail that had been taken over a period of several months. The FBI revealed that the individual who took the snaps was a high school classmate. The latter had software on his PC which allowed him to spy remotely on this girl and others. The individual pleaded guilty to extortion in October.

Laptops that have built-in cameras normally have a privacy feature which turns on a light when that camera is being used. With personal computers, security specialists admit that the warning light can’t be deactivated. But it turned out that in the case of MacBooks someone has worked out a way how to do it.

Actually, the Federal Bureau of Investigations recently admitted that it has known how to do it for many years now – and it’s despite Apple’s assurance that the camera had a “hardware interlock” between it and the light in order to make sure it can’t be turned on without alerting its owner.

Security experts have come up with a way to use MacBook and iMac models older than 2008, which might also work on younger models as well. The matter is that a modern laptop has a number of different computers in one package: although Apple designed its MacBook to block software running on its CPU from activating the camera without turning on the light, you can still target the chip inside the camera (a micro-controller) and defeat this security feature.

Moreover, this also opens up a lot of security vulnerabilities in MacBooks nobody ever really thought of. According to the researchers, an attack can be mounted on Apple batteries to cause them to discharge rapidly – this could potentially lead to a fire or explosion. The researchers even managed to convert a built-in Apple keyboard into spyware using a similar method.

Apparently, it all depends on how much security the manufacturer puts on its hardware, and it appears Apple might not put on enough. The security experts confirmed that they had contacted the company, which got back to them several times. But Apple hasn’t done anything yet.

It looks like the only way to guarantee your privacy is to put a piece of tape on iSight camera and take it off only when you want to use it. This sounds and looks silly, but if you don’t want to receive a picture of yourself naked one day, it might want to consider this idea.