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Zoom privacy risks: The video chat app could be sharing more information than you think - CNET
Security in Zoom is definitely tight for most organizations who are committed to implementing good security policies. Zoom boasts the features of a cloud-based meeting management system loaded with user controls and network security measures designed to prevent disruptions, communicate remotely, and manage meetings effectively.
The Zoom flaw lets hackers take over your Mac or PC if you ignore the rule of thumb. In Zoom there is a new exploit that lets a hacker operate totally or remotely on your PC or Mac while you only watch — although it was learned and explained only by a very few individuals. There are privacy risks associated with this popularity. The data that Zoom collects are not for your personal use. You may also see that they have your full name, email address, phone number, and physical address as well as data collected.
The Zoom software even records a recording of any photos or video you upload during a meeting, as well as any group chats taken by Zoom software.
Zoom is a company whose weaknesses can easily be exploited. Security researchers have also discovered several dangerous vulnerabilities. One vulnerabilities can be used for stealing Windows passwords, and the other is possible for anyone with Zoom-enabled computers and for capturing footage via headphones and microphone.
For added security, simply click the Security icon at the bottom of your Zoom window. Click Lock Meeting under the Pop-Up window. You will only able to join your meeting with your passcode created during the appointment when Booking the Meeting.
This information can be shared privately among attendees. The use of Zoom should be fine, even for conversations about state secrets, healthcare information, or whether to disclose information about a patient or company. For free, people can attend meetings hosted by this easy-to-use app. It features easy registration and easy use. As a result of moving their shoulders on Zoom calls, people are allowing hackers to identify certain keyboard entries, according to the researchers at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Zoom bombings have often represented troll attacks. Zoom meetings and attempts to disrupt or upset the video chat are attempted by hackers by yelling profanity or racial slurs, or uploading disturbing material to the audience.
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Related posts. Until recently, you had probably never heard of the video conferencing software Zoom. So, which side of the divide should you be on? Until last month, its privacy policy contained this statement: Does Zoom sell Personal Data? What action has Zoom taken? Find out more.
But in the fine print, there's a link to "join from your browser. So, there you have it; providing you take the right preventative measures and only use Zoom where it is appropriate, you should be okay. Netitude has been delivering secure, reliable and productive IT for business growth, since If your business needs advice, additional IT support or business technology solutions, get in touch with one of our experts today, we're always happy to help!
Skip to content. One year on, is Zoom safe to use? Lily Howell Mar 19, PM. Oct 4, AM How to tell if your cybersecurity is at risk - 8 signs. Cybersecurity In the Media. Previous Top 6 Cybersecurity Risks for Businesses in Next What client feedback means to us and how we use it. FaceTime got only 4. A new Zoom phishing scam is sure to get the attention of anyone working from home during the coronavirus lockdown. It seems to come from your employer's HR department, and invites you to join a Zoom meeting starting in a few minutes to discuss possible termination of your employment.
If you click on the link in the email to join the meeting, you're taken to a very real-looking Zoom login page. It's fake. If you enter your credentials, then the crooks can take over your Zoom account.
Zoom has finally updated its meeting-client software to version 5. Here's our guide on how to update to Zoom 5. The update is not yet available for iOS, as Apple has to vet the software before the new version of the app can be pushed out.
We also couldn't see in the Google Play app store as of Monday afternoon Eastern time April 27 , but odds are it will appear soon. No other company may have benefited more from the stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus crisis. To put that in perspective, daily usage peaked at million people per day in March, the company said on April 1 opens in new tab.
In December , Zoom usage peaked at 10 million daily users. The new version will include many of the security fixes we've recently seen for the Zoom web interface, including the abilities to kick out Zoom bombers from meetings, make sure meeting data doesn't go through China, and put everyone waiting for a meeting in a "waiting room. We checked the Zoom changelogs opens in new tab and discovered that the update won't be available until Sunday, April Cisco Talos researchers said Zoom's meeting chat function made it too easy for outsiders to find all Zoom users in an particular organization.
If you had a valid Zoom account, Cisco Talos explained in a blog post opens in new tab , you could pretend that you worked at any organization and get the full names and chat IDs of every registered Zoom user whose email address used that organization's email domain. You would not have to verify that you worked there, and you wouldn't even need to be in a Zoom meeting to get the information.
That information "could be leveraged to disclose further contact information including the user's email address, phone number and any other information that is present in their vCard," or digital business card, Cisco Talos wrote.
In a blog post opens in new tab April 20, Zoom said the option of excluding certain countries from call routing was now live. This will let Zoom meeting administrators avoid having meeting data routed through Zoom servers in China, the U. New updates to the Zoom platform opens in new tab for the web interface rolled out April 19 include masking some participant personal information, such as email addresses or phone numbers, during meetings.
Another change is that users who share the same email domain will no longer be able to search for each other by name. The New York Times opens in new tab reported that Dropbox executives were so concerned about security flaws in Zoom that in Dropbox created its own secret bug-bounty program for Zoom flaws. In other words, Dropbox would pay hackers for security vulnerabilities they found in Zoom.
Dropbox staffers used Zoom regularly, and Dropbox was an investor in Zoom. The Times reported that Dropbox would confirm the flaws, then pass them along to Zoom so that Zoom could fix them. Zoom-meeting video recordings saved on Zoom's cloud servers can be easily discovered and often viewed, a security researcher told Cnet opens in new tab.
Phil Guimond opens in new tab noticed that online recordings of Zoom meetings have a predictable URL structure and are thus easy to find. The Washington Post reported last week on a similar issue with Zoom recordings that had been uploaded by users to third-party cloud servers. In those cases, the file names of meeting recordings followed a predictable pattern.
Until Zoom pushed out a series of updates opens in new tab this past Tuesday, Zoom meeting recordings were not required to be password-protected. Guimond built a simple tool that automatically searches for Zoom meeting recordings and tries to open them. If a meeting has a password, his tool tries to brute-force access by running through millions of possible passwords. If a meeting recording is viewable, so is the Zoom meeting ID, and the attacker might be able to access future recurring meetings.
But, Guimond said, the URL pattern is still the same, and attackers could still try to open each generated result manually. Zoom announced it was hiring Luta Security opens in new tab , a consulting firm headed by Katie Moussouris, to revamp Zoom's "bug bounty" program, which pays hackers to find software flaws.
Moussouris set up the first bug-bounty programs at Microsoft and the Pentagon. In her own blog post opens in new tab , she announced that Zoom was bringing in other well-regarded information-security firms and researchers to improve its security.
In its weekly webinar, according to ZDNet opens in new tab , Zoom also said it would also let meeting hosts report abusive users, and newly hired security consultant Alex Stamos said Zoom would be switching to a more robust encryption standard after Zoom's existing encryption was found to be lacking.
In other news, a congressman has complained that a congressional briefing held over Zoom on April 3 was "zoom-bombed" opens in new tab at least three times. The head of Standard Chartered, a London-based multinational bank, has warned employees to not use Zoom or Google Hangouts for remote meetings, citing security concerns, according to Reuters opens in new tab. Standard Chartered primarily uses the rival Blue Jeans video-conferencing platform, according to two bank staffers who spoke anonymously.
Hackers are apparently offering to sell two "zero-day" exploits in Zoom to the highest bidder, Vice opens in new tab reports. Zero-days are hacks that take advantage of vulnerabilities the software maker doesn't know about, and which users have little or no defense against. Sources who told Vice about the zero-days said one exploit is for Windows and lets a remote attacker get full control of a target's computer. The catch is that the attacker and the target have to be on the same Zoom call.
This is a reaction to the discovery earlier in April that many Zoom meetings hosted by and involving U. Usernames and passwords for more than , Zoom accounts are being sold or given away in criminal marketplaces. These accounts were not compromised as the result of a Zoom data breach, but instead through credential stuffing. That's when criminals try to unlock accounts by re-using credentials from accounts compromised in previous data breaches.
It works only if an account holder uses the same password for more than one account. Researchers from IngSights discovered a set of 2, Zoom login credentials being shared in a criminal online forum. Maor told Threatpost opens in new tab it didn't seem like the credentials came from a Zoom data breach, given their relatively small number. It's also possible that some of the credentials were the result of "credential stuffing.
Information-security researchers know of several Zoom "zero-day" exploits opens in new tab , according to Vice. Zero-days are exploits for software vulnerabilities that the software maker doesn't know about and hasn't fixed, and hence has "zero days" to prepare before the exploits appear.
However, one Vice source implied that other video-conferencing solutions also had security flaws. Another source said that Zoom zero-days weren't selling for much money due to lack of demand.
Criminals are trading compromised Zoom accounts on the "dark web," Yahoo News opens in new tab reported. This information apparently came from Israeli cybersecurity firm Sixgill, which specializes in monitoring underground online-criminal activity. We weren't able to find any mention of the findings on the Sixgill website opens in new tab.
Sixgill told Yahoo it had spotted compromised Zoom accounts that included meeting IDs, email addresses, passwords and host keys.
Some of the accounts belonged to schools, and one each to a small business and a large healthcare provider, but most were personal.
If you have a Zoom account, make sure its password isn't the same as the password for any other account you have. Researchers at Trend Micro opens in new tab discovered a version of the Zoom installer that has been bundled with cryptocurrency-mining malware , i. The Zoom installer will put Zoom version 4. By the way, the latest Zoom client software for Windows is up to version 4. The coin-miner will ramp up your PC's central processor unit, and its graphics card if there is one, to solve mathematical problems in order to generate new units of cryptocurrency.
To avoid getting hit with this malware, make sure you're running one of the best antivirus programs, and don't click on any links in emails, social media posts or pop-up messages that promise to install Zoom on your machine.
It can't stop other people from copying and redistributing its installation software. Not only does Zoom mislead users about its "end-to-end encryption" see further down , but its seems to be flat-out, um, not telling the truth about the quality of its encryption algorithm. Zoom says it use AES encryption to encode video and audio data traveling between Zoom servers and Zoom clients i.
But researchers at the Citizen Lab opens in new tab at the University of Toronto, in a report posted April 3, found that Zoom actually uses the somewhat weaker AES algorithm.
Even worse, Zoom uses an in-house implementation of encryption algorithm that preserves patterns from the original file. It's as if someone drew a red circle on a gray wall, and then a censor painted over the red circle with a while circle. You're not seeing the original message, but the shape is still there. Yuan opens in new tab acknowledged the encryption issue but said only that "we recognize that we can do better with our encryption design" and "we expect to have more to share on this front in the coming days.
In Zoom's announcement of the upcoming April 26 desktop-software update, Zoom said it would be upgrading the encryption implementation opens in new tab to a better format for all users by May Good software has built-in anti-tampering mechanisms to make sure that applications don't run code that's been altered by a third party. Zoom has such anti-tampering mechanisms in place, which is good. But those anti-tampering mechanisms themselves are not protected from tampering, said a British computer student who calls himself " Lloyd opens in new tab " in a blog post April 3.
Needless to say, that's bad. Lloyd showed how Zoom's anti-tampering mechanism can easily be disabled, or even replaced with a malicious version that hijacks the application.
If you're reading this with a working knowledge of how Windows software works, this is a pretty damning passage: "This DLL can be trivially unloaded, rendering the anti-tampering mechanism null and void. The DLL is not pinned, meaning an attacker from a 3rd party process could simply inject a remote thread.
In other words, malware already present on a computer could use Zoom's own anti-tampering mechanism to tamper with Zoom. Criminals could also create fully working versions of Zoom that have been altered to perform malicious acts. The Zoom video meeting and chat app skyrocketed in popularity as millions of people looked for new ways to work, study and socialize amid the coronavirus pandemic. With the option to customize your background and newer features such as Immersive View and a vanishing pen tool , it's easy to see why Zoom's popularity hasn't dwindled even as COVID vaccines and booster shots roll out and offices become hybrid workplaces.
But that popularity comes with privacy risks. From built-in attention-tracking features which have since been disabled to exploitable software bugs and issues with "Zoom-bombing" where uninvited attendees break into and disrupt meetings , Zoom's security practices have drawn scrutiny worldwide. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also cautioned people working from home about the software's onboard privacy features. Read more: 20 Zoom video chat tips, tricks and hidden features.
Privacy experts previously expressed concerns about Zoom in , when the video-conferencing software experienced both a webcam hacking scandal , and a bug that allowed people to potentially join video meetings they hadn't been invited to , if those meetings weren't protected with a password.
The issues were exacerbated by Zoom's widespread adoption at the start of the pandemic, but this was just the latest chapter in the software's rocky security history. It prompted Zoom CEO Eric Yuan to respond to concerns in April , freezing feature updates to address security issues over a day update rollout. Zoom saw explosive growth at the time, increasing its ranks from 2, to 6, employees from February to December
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