The webcam hacking epidemic

In 2009, when Susan Clements-Jeffrey purchased a used laptop from a student at the high school where she substitute taught, chances are she didn’t expect that the transaction would conclude with local police in her living room, laughing at her and calling her “stupid” while showing her explicit pictures of herself taken from her computer. Later, at the police station, according to court documents, the abuse continued, with the men now calling her disgusting while reading from her private instant message chats. The laptop, it turned out, had been stolen before she bought it, and it came equipped with a Remote Access Tool, or RAT.

RATs are software that allow a third party to spy on a computer user from afar, whether rifling through messages and browsing activity, photographing the computer screen, or in many cases hijacking the webcam and taking photographs of whomever is on the other side. RATs are widely used in a variety of contexts, some benign, others not. Across the board, abuse tends to be the rule.

It’s hard to know how many RATs are out there because of their covert nature. Recent reports confirm hundreds of thousands of computers infected in 2014 by only a single type of RAT, with the actual number of infections across years and technology far, far higher. School districts have used RATs to spy on students in their bedrooms; rent-to-own computer stores have secretly watched their customers. Online, at places like HackForums.net, individuals, often men, trade and sell access to strangers’ computers, often women, gained via RAT. The jargon that ratters use underscores the power dynamic—ratted computers are called “slaves.”