 Hi there, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal. I'm a marketing consultant, tech writer, general tech enthusiast, and sometimes a little bit privacy conscious. Now, what I'm talking about today is a solution for cheap solution, easy solution, if you are using a connected device, USB peripherals, webcam, microphone, both a webcam and a microphone, and you're edgy about leaving those things connected to your computer when you're not actively monitoring what's going on in the computer. And look, people will call this a tinfoil hack conspiracy theorist, but honestly, it is not an unfounded thing to be worried about. Now, here's the concern. So if you're using a laptop computer, you're probably connecting via the, using the built-in webcam on the microphone. You might also just be using the internal microphone on the computer. But if you're using like me, a desktop computer, then you use peripherals to create all those things. Desktops don't have their own webcams. So I'm using actually two USB devices just to record the screencast you're watching. I'm using a webcam to record the video feed, and I'm using a USB lav mic to record the audio feed. Now, here's what I do. I disconnect the lav mic and the webcam between when I record these and between Zoom meetings. Sometimes I do use this technique that I'm gonna show you the KVM use. More typically for things that I leave attached to the desktop rather than my desk. But it wouldn't really, I would trust this enough to use this full-time. Now, here's what we're talking about. We're talking about what can go wrong here. Well, what can go wrong is that it is possible that hackers or other nefarious people will be able to get access to your webcam feed. It may not be somebody sitting so far away. It could be somebody on the same network as you who's managed to get through your firewall, take access of those feeds, the USB peripherals connected to the computer, and siphoned off feeds to someplace else. So let's just take a look at some of the writing here like this, Kaspersky have this guide, webcam hacking, can your webcams spy on you? There's a lot of stuff like this on the internet. And basically the skinny is that it is a real thing. Camfecting, interesting Wikipedia. In the notable cases section, they talk about how Marcus Thomas, former assistant director of the FBI's operational tech division, said in a 2013 story that the FBI had been able to covertly activate a computer's camera without triggering the lights that lets users know it is recording for several years. Now folks, I have to tell you something. Most webcams do have these little lights, that LED lights that pop on when the camera is activated and when you go into a Zoom meeting, you'll see a little light turn on in the webcam. If you think that multi-billion dollar intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies do not have a way to get over that, you may not be paranoid enough yet. Now it's possible that the manufacturers have put backdoors in, but that's 2013 and we're talking about eight years in the past, somebody from the FBI saying, by the way, we can access webcams and we can get past that little blinking light thing. So I would just work under the assumption that pretty much anything's possible for skilled enough hackers and do not trust a LED light as your only means of knowing that the webcam is not being used. Now there are software protections as well on the market. I'm not really aware of ones for Linux, which is what I use, but certainly for Windows and Mac consumer reports have this overview how to protect yourself from camera, microphone hacking, talks about some ideas here, check your device permissions, and this is good for iPhone, upkeep your software and firmware updated, and then it talks about the tape method and Mark Zuckerberg using a piece of tape to protect his laptop. Now physical controls are, that's already the level of physical device protection, physical isolation. Now I actually do this myself. I bought this webcam. Not sure whether the 930E had this or I bought this, but if your webcam doesn't have this, you can totally buy it for like few bucks on AliExpress or eBay, a little privacy flip. Now the webcam's still active, still recording, but it's just a piece of plastic I just did there that just flips over the webcam. You can also buy another Gizmo, do honestly recommend, protect yourself in as many ways as you can. Laptop webcam protector and these are like these little, again, look how cheap these things are. Let's say you needed five of them, 84 cents and $1 in shipping, two bucks to give yourself the peace of mind, put those on every single device you own. That's honestly my advice. Why would you wanna take risks when you could avoid the risk for two bucks? So these things will put them on your smartphone, you will put them on your laptop webcam. I, you know, the little camera lens there and it's just a little switch. And when you don't use a webcam, you put the switch across, and when you do, you put it across. Couldn't be simpler, physical device control. That doesn't get us 100% of the way. The reason that is is because let's take the example of this webcam, the Logitech C930E. So you know, I do my video, let's say I wasn't using the lav mic, I was using the built-in microphone, right? I do my clip in OBS, I put it up to YouTube, and I go back to doing other stuff. Now, I leave that connected via USB, am I safe? I put my flips, my lid down. The answer is there's still a bit of a risk there because why that has a built-in microphone is not just a webcam, it's a microphone, and a microphone can make it into a listening device and technically, technically, technically. Firewalls should work, all these protections should work, but it's theoretically possible someone could get into it now. Let me show you what the big guys use, big guys of the world. This is actually quite cool because these guys are based in Israel and I happen to discover them via LinkedIn, some guy I'm connected with was posting their products and I was like, ah, there has to be something like pro-level for this. So there is. So if you go into, for instance, Secure Video, you can see here, and I'm sorry about the drilling noise in the background, it's driving me absolutely up a wall. If you take a look at this blocker diode, this is what the pros would be using and by the pros I'm talking about, your law enforcement agencies, your intelligence agencies, your government agencies, people that are really concerned about their cybersecurity and that needs products that are certified to be compliant with their needs. So that is actually a thing. It's a real product category. There's real people who use these things. Now I don't know if this company sells direct to consumer. I did ask the company, I don't remember what they said. I thought they said yes, but I've never seen these on the local market here and they're made in Israel, which is cool. So I think the answer is they don't, but they might. So if you're really interested, Fibernet.tech is the URL and why don't you, you could go and just drop them and email yourself or see if this, I'm sure there are other companies doing this kind of thing. Now this is kind of sort of similar to a KVM, but I'm sure it's fancier, right? So from what you can tell about this hardware, just looking at this photo, you know, you got your two USB ports, you've got a timer switch so that you can have a lockout timer and you have a 3.5 mil iPod and a 3.5 mil input and this blocker, this secure camera device they also have, I mean, they have the works, this crowd. They have HDMI cabling, they have dongles, HDMI dongles and that's just in the secure video category, secure audio, secure KVM, super, super cool stuff. Really, really, really cool. Audio blocker provides hardware security preventing leakage from the speaker device towards the microphone and again, you can see it's kind of all the same concept, right? They just have physical blocking built in but essentially they're just kind of souped up versions where I can see in certified versions and more advanced versions of KVM switches that you can guess through other channels. So I'm not gonna do the work of fiber tech for them and show you their intriguing product offering just to say that there are pro level tools if you wanna go in that direction. Now let me show you what the non pro level tools are gonna look like. AliExpress, have you heard about AliExpress? Have I mentioned AliExpress? AliExpress do also have some of this stuff. So put in USB KVM to AliExpress and you'll find a number of products here and of varying degrees of quality, some are USB 3, some are USB 2. I'm sure if you put in probably 3.5 mil audio KVM, you would get something too. I just put in there the audio KVM. This is the HDMI KVM. This is an audio switch. I'm going back to USB KVM. They all work on a really similar concept. If you haven't used a KVM before, let's take one of these. Let's just take the one I have as an example in front of me. So look, $5.80 plus a little bit of shipping and it works like this. So your USB, you plug in, you'll plug in your device you wanna protect here where it says USB console and there is a little switch. You see it says PC1, PC2 here, PC1, PC2 and that's got an LED light and depending on which LED light is illuminated, that's where the output will go and you put the outputs left or right. Now what would I recommend if you're, this is not what people typically buy KVM switches for. They typically buy them for, you'd have let's say one, a keyboard and you'd be toggling the keyboard to two different computers. Again, if you're using a sophisticated workstation with two physically separate computers on it, you could buy one of these for your computer, your keyboard, one of these for your mice, hit a button and the button would toggle which. So you'll see these things in emergency response centers. How do I know this? Because I'm a huge multi monitor workstation geek and I follow these accounts on Google images. They're amazing set up some of these guys have. Dispatch centers, ambulance dispatch centers, police dispatch centers would use these KVM things quite a bit. So that's what a KVM is typically used for, but you can use it for device protection. So let me just show you how I'm going to do this. So here's the product we just looked at on AliExpress. Here it is in real life and you can see it's just pretty much as it looked in the product description. If you can hear me over this awful drilling. And they're going to be putting the webcam into this site here. So webcam will go into the bottom here and I'm going to be, I'm going to just try to wrap this up soon before I have a headache. And one goes out and one goes out here, one goes out here. So what I'll do is using, now the end of this is in some of these KVMs. I would look for probably one with regular USB. It's a bit inconvenient. It's got a USB type A here Okay, so that goes in here. I'm just going to connect this guy up and hopefully this will work for us. No success on the first attempt. Ah, yeah, we have success on the first attempt. So the red light indicates where the source is going to. Now I don't know why. I think the first time I used, I used USB output. The regular USB didn't work. I had to use the USB type B cabling. Don't know why. It doesn't really matter to me because I have both on hand. Cool like that. So I'm just going to open up another instance of OBS and I'm going to show you what goes on in real life as I try to actually do that. So now I've got our test web kind of hooked up to, I want to just make sure before I go and show you how this works. So I've got OBS Studio number two here on my second screen. And I'm going to show you that just momentarily. So you should be able to see my second OBS Studio screen now. And what I'm going to do is go ahead and demonstrate what happens when I attempt to connect the devices onto it. Okay, so I'm going to click on the plus symbol and go add video capture device. I'm going to call this webcam two. Now before I do that, let me show you what is going on on the hardware level here. So the KVM, I'm just going to move the main webcam down for a second. I've got this KVM hooked up to my computer. It's a USB two KVM webcoms going in here and you can see the PC one buttons active. Now key to this is to not have anything. I'm not using anything to the second computer. So second computer is not hooked up because I only use one computer. So that's there. And now we can go and add in OBS Studio. We can go add webcam two. And I do have one of these privacy shields on the webcam, multiple layers of protection. So I'm just going to open it now and you can see upside down. You can see the screen, right? You can see, you can see me. So let's just go and add that into our second OBS, just looking at the monitor and then you can turn it to me here and you can see me twice. So that's working. I'm just going to set this up for a minute on the point somewhere that we can keep it easily static. I'm going to put it looking at one of the speakers on my desk, okay? Now, the big moment. So what I'm going to do now is go to the KBM and that's your meetings over or Zoom meetings over. I'm going to push the button. Now this should be channeling the output to the non-existent second computer which should mean that this feed is no longer a feed. And look, I'm putting my hand in front of the webcam and there is nothing to get because the webcam is finished. Now, OBS is a tiny bit buggy so in order to really do this test, I'm going to put it back on. I don't think it's going to work again live but what I can do, so now the KBM switch is onto PC1 which is the active side of the KBM switch. And what I can do is just re-add that as a source test webcam and now we're back. You can see me just putting my hands here in front of the computer. So this is basically it in a nutshell how to use a KBM switch to provide, I think a pretty reasonably good degree. Now I'm not saying this is going to be the same thing, this $5 KBM as what the law enforcement and the Intel guys are using but it should work as long as the LCD is illuminated, you know which size it's outputting to and if you turn it off to the blank side like I've just done, by literally just pressing a button on this thing or just taking it off the computer but just press it one button, toggle the side and it will be not going into your computer and what I would do is buy, for five bucks, I would buy as many of these things as you have USB devices to protect. So if you have commonly hook up to your computer, let's say one webcam, one microphone, now go ahead and just buy two of them, maybe buy three have on spare and that is basically how you can use KBM switches to protect yourself from spyware and unauthorized malicious use of your USB peripherals. Hope this video was useful, if you'd like to get more videos from myself then feel free to subscribe to this YouTube channel.