One upside of the ongoing NSA spying debacle is that it has more electronics users to consider privacy and security. Indeed, it seems more issues of sketchy data collection have surfaced lately, like that Android (News - Alert) flashlight app that was surreptitiously collecting user data. More recently, The Washington Post reported the prevalence of webcam spying, especially on those using a MacBook.

Although the webcams in Apple’s (News - Alert) computers were designed to prevent any type of spying, whether from the NSA or otherwise, a new study from Stephen Checkoway, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins, and Johns Hopkins graduate student Matthew Brocker suggests any preventive measures weren’t enough.

In particular, the co-authors of the study looked at hardware from 2008-era Apple products, which feature a ‘hardware interlock’ between the camera and webcam light that is meant to ensure the activation of the first will always activate the other. In other words, if a MacBook’s camera is on, it should alert the owner of this no matter what. But, as Checkoway and Brocker discovered, there’s a way around this security feature.

The workaround simply reprograms the chip, or microcontroller, inside the camera to defeat this security feature. The study, entitled “iSeeYou: Disabling the MacBook Webcam Indicator LED,” details how to accomplish this.

What’s worse, this type of microcontroller attack can, and has, been used to directly attack other components, like a device’s battery, rapidly discharging it to cause a fire or explosion. In other words, a hacker using this method could go beyond simply spying if he or she so desired.

Fortunately, this study means that Apple is now aware of this vulnerability — though in typical Apple fashion, the comment has yet to comment — so it’s possible a fix may be rolled out or, at the very least, new iterations of Apple hardware may be less susceptible to microcontroller attacks.