In April 2020, when pandemic remote working led to a 500% increase in daily traffic to the Zoom download page, some critics said the company’s software was “a privacy disaster” and even malware.
It is not the first time Zoom’s focus on frictionless use has led to a security hole. Normally, the company tries to ensure that is safe by limiting the installer to only operate on code that has been cryptographically signed by Zoom, but the bug discovered by Wardle means that an attacker could trivially bypass that protection and convince the installer to load and run any malware they want. In order to make the user journey simpler, the installer continues to run in the background from the moment a user first installs zoom, and does so with “superuser” privileges, allowing it to change anything about the computer. It targets the Zoom installer, which the company uses to enable frictionless automatic updates. Easily connect to participants on mobile devices, desktops, and in other rooms across a variety of locations. Discovered by an independent security researcher, Patrick Wardle – whose brother Jeremy invented the popular game Wordle – the vulnerability was first presented at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas last week. Free Screenshots iPhone iPad Zoom Rooms video conferencing systems use appliance or custom hardware deployments to bring high-quality video, audio, and sharing to any type of workspace, making it extremely flexible.
