How to deactivate the webcam and the microphone in our Ubuntu

Currently there are many malware attacks that our computers suffer. Attacks that steal our privacy and important data. The most popular attacks affect MacOS and Windows but it is true that As Ubuntu and other Gnu / Linux platforms become more popular, they will also be more prone to such attacks..

Next we will tell you how to deactivate the webcam and the microphone of our equipment to prevent a malware attack from recording or capturing our conversions.

Turn off the microphone

The microphone can be a tool that we use more often than the webcam, that is why it is recommended to mute the device instead of disabling it. To do this we have to install a complete audio manager like Gnome Alsa Mixer and mute the devices related to the microphone, which in this case will have the letters MIC. Thus, to install this audio manager we have to open a terminal and write the following:

sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixer

Disable webcam

In this case we can do it in two ways; O well we deactivate the webcam driver or we disable it temporarily. Personally or I recommend the latter because in case of error restarting the computer will be enough but if we deactivate the controller, the changes will be permanent.

To deactivate the controller permanently we have to open the terminal and write:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

And at the end of the file add the following line:

blacklist uvcvideo

To disable the operation temporarily, we just have to execute the following command in the terminal:

sudo modprobe -r uvcvideo

This will limit it temporarily, something that can be corrected with a restart but if we do not want to use the webcam, it may be a better option to permanently disable it. In any case, both solutions work to prevent malware from taking over our webcam and microphone.