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My webcam just came on "out of the blue"

Fresh7 days ago
Mar 15, 202625087 views
Confidence Score1%
1%

Problem

I have a Microsoft LifeCam HD sitting atop my monitor. Today, completely out of the blue, its light came on -- I was simply browsing the web (in Chrome) when it happened. After about 5 minutes the webcam turned off. Naturally, I immediately suspected my ex-wife (when in doubt, I always suspect her), but she isn't computer savvy enough. I looked over the process list and didn't see anything suspicious. I am running a couple of open source projects and free apps (e.g., greenshot, powermenu, supertray), but I've had them for years. Autoruns reports nothing suspicious in the startup and neither does Windows Defender. Anyways, what could it be? What should I look at next?

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Fix for: My webcam just came on "out of the blue"

Low Risk

Process Explorer from Microsoft would be my next guess : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653. Once you have loaded it up, click View -> Lower Pane View -> Handles. Now when you click on each of the processes in the top Pane, you get a report about all of the files and registry keys it has open. The keys are the important bit. It can list lots of information about currently running processes, and although I don't know for sure if it will definitely tell which process has the…

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