How do I tell if my IP is hacked?

Is my webcam hacked?

• I recently got a message from someone on a chatroom saying he was sent pics of me from my webcam, and he knows it was me because of the IP address. The asshole is trying to get me to go on cam or else he would send the pic to every computer on our IP, including my mom's. He claims that I have a trojan on my computer, and someone hacked into it while I was talking to my boyfriend and snapped pictures of me. Then photoshopped them to look naked. I can't get the guy to show me the pics or even tell me what i was wearing in them, but I looked it up online and it is possible for someone to hack onto my built in webcam. I think I changed my IP address by typing ipconfig/release and then ipconfig/renew into my cmd command. Is that enough to protect me? This guy says my IP is public, and thus anyone with the know-how can hack into it and watch me. Any help? I'm getting really freaked out by all of this. And can he really send pics to all computers on my network? I wasn't doing anything wrong, but he says they altered my top to look like i was nude.

• Answer:

  Is it possible? Yes. Did this guy do it? Almost certainly not. If he did, he'd describe what you were wearing or even send you one of the pictures - what better way to convince you than to prove that he's saying the truth? And no - he can't send pictures to computers on your network. What he could do is post it on a website where others could see it, but he can't send directly to a computer. Of course you can do some of your own bluffing. Tell him that you went to the police. Better still, really go to the police, but ideally you should get hold of his own IP address first if you can. If you do that, you can find out which ISP he's using, and contact them to report the abuse.