The Exhibit A why no one will ever convince me to turn off my ad blocker or switch away from Firefox. It's a great feeling to just not have to worry about this entire class of exploits.
Or use a computer without a mic/webcam permanently embedded or attached. I'm glad I'm constantly reminded that not having such peripherals can be a good thing.
Be careful with those on laptops. I had a 2016 Macbook Pro and put one of those one it. About 1 month later I had a nice big crack in display straight down the middle of the screen.
I'm not 100% certain that was the cause. But the guy at the Apple store seemed to think it was, which meant they wouldn't pay for it. And a quick google shows others who are convinced.
The bezel on that laptop was really tiny and I can easily see it might have contributed to the crack. I now have a 2021 model and the bezel is much thicker. But I'm not taking the chance.
Disable it in system settings, browser settings, and prevent access through something like firejail. It is not as reliable as a hardware kill-off switch, but puts a lot of barriers to overcome.
plug in an un-wired connector, cut of the wiring post, smooth with a nail-file or put on a crowning drop of glue so it won't rip your bag and you're done.
Often these are software, though. Yes there's a switch, but it just tells the audio subsystem to automatically select the plugged-in mic. You can still tell it to select the screen-frame mic instead.
Or open up your laptop and (carefully) destroy it.
I can’t remember the last time I used the built-in mic on a laptop, much less the last time I bought a laptop with a mic that was actually worth using.
My laptop is mostly closed and plugged in to an external monitor. The mic is so muffled by then, it would take expert audio recovery to understand what was being said. (In other words, it would be hard to scale it for ad purposes, but obviously a targeted attack could still be devastating).
