Security researchers at Johns Hopkins University recently demonstrated a unique new attack that can force the iSight cameras in legacy MacBook and iMac models to capture images without turning on the camera’s accompanying LED. Matthew Brocker and Stephen Checkoway were the researchers who outline the attack, which targets firmware inside the iSight camera’s controller chip, in a paper entitled “iSeeYou: Disabling the MacBook Webcam Indicator LED.”

As many of you probably already know, Apple designed the iSight camera system with a “hardware interlock” between the camera sensor and the indicator