How to kill your camera in Mavericks

Posted by Dark Training on January 2, 2014 tags: | security | mac

There have been a number of "fun" viruses and other code as of late that try to use your camera in your apple computer. A while back a group of folks at techslaves.org created a tool that would disable the ichat camera (that little camera in your macbook or iMac). The problem is that they have not updated their code in a while and there was not really a good solution for Mavericks.

Today that changes, I'm releasing the following simple script that should help Mavericks users disable their cameras. You can download the file here.

To use the script, simply download the file, then open Applications > Utilities > Terminal.

In terminal just type:

cd ~/Downloads
unzip kill-cam.zip
chmod 755 kill-cam.sh
./kill-cam.sh

This will prompt you to press either "1" or "2" depending on if you want to enable or disable the camera.

If you want to change (read re-enable) your camera, all you need to do is launch terminal again and type:

cd ~/Downloads
./kill-cam.sh

Then select "2".

Leave a comment below and let me know if this works for you in 10.9.

For the un-trusting type (like me) here is the script:

#!/bin/bash

declare -a arr=(/Library/CoreMediaIO/Plug-Ins/DAL/AppleCamera.plugin/Contents/MacOS/AppleCamera /Library/CoreMediaIO/Plug-Ins/FCP-DAL/AppleCamera.plugin/Contents/MacOS/AppleCamera /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreMediaIO.framework/Versions/A/Resources/VDC.plugin/Contents/MacOS/VDC)

trigger () {
for i in ${arr[@]}; do 
 sudo chmod $1 $i
done
}
 
printf "(1) Kill camera \n(2)enable camera \n"
read coms
if [ $coms -eq 1 ]; then
 trigger 000;
else 
 trigger 755; 
fi