The things to follow in the bid to discover how to know if someone is remotely using your laptop without your knowledge or consent. Well, we live in a world that cannot be predicted at least in terms of technological capabilities. This is why it becomes pertinent to assist you in gathering some tech hacks that will give you the right knowledge.
This knowledge will help you know how to outsmart those who take your ignorance to their own advantage, while the primary effect of this still borders along hurting you.
You Suspect Someone Using your Laptop?
The hurt is over just as there is an end to their “smartness”! Let us teach you how to know if someone is remotely using your laptop. These are highlighted below to assist you:
Turn Off Your Internet Connection
The source of remote activity on your computer has to be through the internet. Hence, the primary check for a remote connection to your computer would be turning off your internet connection.
If you were experiencing some suspicious activity on your laptop, and it stopped once you removed the internet connection, chances are the problem – whatever it is – is remote.
On top of it, if your laptop tries to connect to the internet on its own, without you commanding it, it even strengthens the possibility of someone accessing your computer after breaking into it remotely.
One thing needs to be understood. Mal-activity in the presence of an internet connection doesn’t directly suggest that someone is remotely accessing your PC. It could very well be some other issue.
Look Out for Recently Accessed Apps and Files
Once you’re done gauging the behavior of your laptop with and without an internet connection, the next thing is to see if there are any files or apps – about which you know nothing – running on your PC. And it’s pretty simple to do so.
Read Also: Impact of Remote Studying and Online Homework on Students’ Productivity
You can check the “Recent Files” option on Windows to find any recently accessed files that you haven’t opened in a while or know anything of. Here’s how you can do that.
- Press Windows + E.
- In the tab that pops up, click the lower-screen tab that reads “Recent Files”.
To check the recently accessed files on Windows, you can simply navigate to the Start menu. Here, on the top row, you’ll find the apps that have been opened recently.
On a Mac, you can check the recent tapping of the Apple menu by clicking the Apple menu located at the top-left corner of the screen. Here, click on the “Recent Items” option. You can review the recent files, applications, and server usage history in the next tab.
If you find files or apps you’ve no idea of or haven’t opened for a long time, there’s a great chance someone has been messing up with your system.
Check the Task Manager
What if someone has been accessing your computer right under your nose? To check this possibility, you can open the Task Manager in Windows or the Activity Monitor on Mac to see if there’s some application running that you didn’t initiate.
To open the Task Manager on Windows, you can simply type it on your Windows search bar. To open the Activity Monitor on your Mac, go to “Applications” > “Utilities” > “Activity Monitor”. You’re home!
Before you relate every app you haven’t opened to foreign activity, let me say that many apps – especially system apps – run in the background. So you don’t need to be particularly worried about them.
But if you see non-system apps running on their own without you initiating the app, check if you’ve installed those apps or not. Also, run them through a reputed anti-virus scanner.
Scan Your Computer
The most obvious and probable way someone can access your laptop is by hacking it. Naturally, for that, they’ll install malware on your system. You can do many things to find out the viruses – if any – on your system.
For Windows, you can simply go to Settings. Here, navigate to the “Updates & Security” tab. Next, go to the “Windows Security” tab. Here, you can run a complete scan for malware.
Tech Solutions
Having gone through how to know if someone is remotely using your laptop, one of the best ways to prevent the person or robot is by quarantining all suspicious apps. If things are intense enough, you might need to sign out of all your e-mails and change your passwords. Next, you can use an anti-malware system such as Bitdefender to root out any malware on your device.
