A MIDDLE-AGED man is being held on suspicion of hacking into the computer of a 17-year-old girl and activating her webcam to spy on her for sexual kicks.

The case is expected to heighten concern among police forces around the world over the possibility of Peeping Toms controlling webcams remotely to invade people’s privacy.

“Footage could not only be used to blackmail unfaithful spouses but also burglars could keep a ‘cyber eye’ on when people are out of their homes,” Petros Demetriades, a web specialist, told The Times.

Police believe that the 45-year-old suspect, a married computer technician from Cyprus, tracked the girl down through a chatroom. He is believed then to have sent her a Trojan file, giving him access to the PC in her bedroom.

The file asked her to include him in her list of friends. She rejected the request, but he kept coming back to her. Then he sent her a video clip showing her emerging from the bathroom in a towel, followed by scenes of her getting dressed.

She burst into tears, and immediately received a message from the hacker on her computer telling her to stop crying. The girl realised to her horror that he was watching her at that moment.

The man then asked her to undress in front of the webcam and when she refused he threatened to send the earlier video clip to everyone on her e-mail list. The distraught girl promptly shut down her computer.

The next day she discovered that the hacker had broken into her computer, stolen all her personal data and tracked down her mobile phone number. He then began to send her text messages and called her on her mobile phone using a prepaid phone card. The girl complained to police and officers tracked the man down in early April. They arrested him on Monday night on suspicion of sexual harassment.

Technicians say that it is possible to activate remotely a webcam to capture images that can be stored as files on the hacker’s computer and subsequently retrieved. “I’ve never come across a case like this,” Mr Demetriades said, “but when I did have a webcam I used to always physically disconnect it from the computer precisely because of this type of problem. There are so many ways today that people can take control of a computer by exploiting vulnerabilities in the operating systems.

The abuse of webcams was put to comic effect in the 1999 hit teen film American Pie, in which a group of frustrated high-school boys use a webcam to spy on a sexy foreign- exchange student.

There was nothing funny about the case in Cyprus. It is feared that the girl was just one of the suspect’s victims and that he used to prowl chat-rooms until he made contact with young women.

Webcams are cheap and increasingly common. They can be used for video-conferencing by computer, a much cheaper alternative to standard video-conferencing facilities.

They are also popular with working parents who want to keep an eye on their babysitter and children or for employers keen to ensure that a cleaner is arriving on time and not slacking. But potential dangers are also being discovered.

Malwares — the generic term for a program that spies on a computer’s activities — have been detected recently that enable hackers to take screen shots of whatever programmes are operating on a computer. These could put at risk those using online banking services, jobseekers or anyone reading private e-mails or documents.

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