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Zoom safe to download. www.makeuseof.com
Much like photo-bombing, which sees people insert themselves into unsuspecting people's snaps, Zoom-bombing refers to the practice of users logging into Zoom calls that they were not invited to. But how is Zoom-bombing possible? Zoom uses a unique meeting ID number for every chat on its platform. The number is between nine and 11 digits long and is used to get access to a conference. However, meeting ID numbers can be easily guessed.
As a result, pranksters are joining calls and creating havoc using features such as screen sharing. At best, it's very annoying. At worst, it compromises your data, especially if you are on a confidential business call. The solution is simple—set a password for every Zoom call you participate in.
Zoom has also introduced a way to suspend participants' activities, meaning you can boot imposters out of your call. Read our comprehensive guide to Zoom-bombing to learn more. If you want to use Zoom on a desktop machine, you have two options: the desktop app or the web app.
You should always use the web browser version; this gets new security enhancements much faster than the desktop app. And aside from the updates, the web version is still more secure. That's because it lives in a browser's sandbox, meaning it has far fewer permissions and a reduced ability to cause issues across your entire operating system.
If you'd prefer to use an app for Zoom, consider Skype for Business. It has a secure Zoom integration. At the start of , Zoom heavily advertised its end-to-end encryption as a key feature.
In theory, that means that all communications between you and the other people in your chat would only be visible to those parties; nobody could decrypt them. The claims were quickly shown to be false. Data was encrypted, but only between you and the Zoom servers. While that means that snoopers and local hackers on your public Wi-Fi network would not be able to see your calls, Zoom employees could see everything. Therefore, if a government or law enforcement agency were to request access to your chats, they could easily get them.
In late October , Zoom did finally roll out true end-to-end encryption, but the entire episode left a bad taste and showed Zoom could not be trusted as a business. Head to Settings and toggle Allow use of end-to-end encryption to enable the feature.
The Zoom installer has been widely copied and redistributed. Many of those redistributions had malware bundled in with the installer in an attempt to trick unsuspecting users. The most famous example is the cryptocurrency-mining malware that was found in Zoom installers in April If installed, it would eat through your CPU and GPU in a bid to mine Bitcoin, leaving you with little free power to do anything else on your machine.
This flaw isn't Zoom's fault. But it shows how hackers will target anything that's "hot" at a given moment and exploit it. With the number of daily users exploding from 10 million to million from December to March, it has become a forum for nearly every kind of social function, including happy hours, yoga sessions, school classes, funeral services as well as Passover, Easter and soon Ramadan rituals. But no sooner had many tried Zoom for the first time than they began to hear reasons they might want to stay away.
Trolls have crashed meetings, flashing porn or racist slurs on screens. Security researchers released report after report on newly discovered vulnerabilities including leaked emails and bugs that might have allowed hackers to access webcams.
Zoom Chief Executive Eric Yuan said in a blog post March 27 that the company removed code that sent user data to Facebook in an updated version of the iOS app. The company updated its privacy policy March 29 after a swell of concern from users. Last July, security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh exposed a flaw that allowed hackers to take over Mac webcams through the app.
The company fixed the problem after a public interest research center filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. Thousands of personal Zoom videos were left viewable on the open web, including one-on-one therapy sessions, telehealth calls, and elementary school classes, the Washington Post reported. Experts say the company now seems to be making more serious efforts to identify and quickly patch vulnerabilities. Zoom marketed its communications as protected by end-to-end encryption, which makes it, in effect, impossible for anyone, including the company itself, to spy on them.
Recently, however, the Intercept revealed Zoom has been using a different type of encryption, called transport encryption, which enables the company to decode the content of calls. That means the company could hypothetically be susceptible to pressure from government authorities to disclose communications, said Bill Marczak, a fellow at the Citizen Lab and a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley.
But reporters or dissidents under oppressive regimes, government officials discussing classified information or big companies that want to keep their business strategies confidential might want to use a more secure platform, Budington said.
The company announced it had removed the feature in an April 2 blog post. They can also record audio and video from meetings and save a record of group chats. Because Zoom is so easy to use, it has also been easy for people to exploit the app to sow mischief or chaos.
As USC and local school districts transitioned to online meetings, they reported getting Zoombombed with racist taunts and pornographic images. On Tuesday, Berkeley High School students were in the middle of a video conference when a man joined the Zoom meeting, exposed himself and shouted obscenities, the Mercury News reported. The New York Times found scores of accounts on Instagram and on Reddit and 4Chan message boards where users coordinated to share meeting passwords and derail Zoom meetings.
Generate a new ID for every meeting you launch using the options panel, instead of using your personal meeting ID. You can toggle settings to ensure meeting participants need a password to access the meeting, which will further protect from disruption.
Beginning April 4, Zoom enabled the Waiting Room feature by default, requiring additional password settings for free users. Zoom has a guide to the feature on its website.
- Zoom security issues: What's gone wrong and what's been fixed | Tom's Guide
Is Zoom Safe to Use? Here's What You Need to Know
According to an academic paper from the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma, people on your Zoom call could theoretically tell what you are typing by watching the movements in your arms and shoulders. All the hacker would need to do is record your call in p and then feed it through a computer program that strips the background.
By monitoring your arms and shoulders relative to your head, they would be able to tell exactly what keystrokes you had made. The lesson? Never log into your accounts while on a call.
If you do need to enter a password, you should briefly disable your video feed while you type. Wearing sleeves, covering your shoulders, and touch-typing with 10 fingers also increases the difficulty of this method for hackers. Zoom has a long list of security flaws. Many of them have now been fixed, but it raises the question of how many more undiscovered vulnerabilities are still available for hackers to exploit.
Here's a quick rundown of some of the most headline-worthy Zoom flaws and security breaches in alone:. If you need more information, check out our list of ways to make your Zoom calls more secure. Given all the Zoom security issues, should you think about using an alternative instead? Sadly, it's not so simple. Firstly, Zoom is far from being the only video conferencing app with security issues.
Services such as Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex have all received flack from security experts over privacy concerns. For that, I am deeply sorry, and I want to share what we are doing about it. Going forward, the company will have third party experts review its privacy policies, and prepare an official transparency report for users. Although Zoom's software was updated and removed any data connections to Facebook , the lawsuit is ongoing.
Additionally, Zoom nixed the "attendee attention tracking" feature that let administrators know when users were in different tabs aka, weren't paying attention to the all-staff brainstorm , and released fixes for Mac-related concerns about webcam and mic takeovers. Zoom isn't the only video chat company experiencing issues as its downloads soar. Last week, Houseparty's security came into question when people claimed they had their Spotify or email hacked after logging on.
On Twitter, Houseparty explained that it believes the rumors were started by a " paid commercial smear campaign to harm " the company. From legal rights pertaining to the protection of your data, to simple-to-follow security measures, Podnar tells Bustle there are significant ways you can make yourself less vulnerable to hacking when videoconferencing.
When you sign up for a new app, don't use a different one Facebook, Google, etc. Frankly, these are longstanding standard policies at many other online companies, so we're a little surprised that they weren't already Zoom policies.
Yuan announced opens in new tab. The purchase price or other terms of the deal were not disclosed. Keybase makes user-friendly software to easily and securely encrypt messaging and social media posts. In March, Zoom had to admit that its touted "end-to-end" encryption was not the real thing because Zoom's own servers are always able to access the contents of meetings. Once Keybase's technology is incorporated, that will no longer always be the case.
Meeting passwords and waiting rooms will be required by default for all Zoom meetings, free or paid, beginning May 9, Zoom announced. Only hosts will be able to share their screens by default, but like the other settings, that can be changed.
Yuan said the massive increase in Zoom usage since the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown had been "challenging," but also provided "opportunities for us to drive meaningful change and improvement. Yuan admitted that "we failed to set pre-configured security features for our new customers, especially for schools," referring to meeting passwords and waiting rooms.
That resulted in "uninvited, offensive, and sometimes even truly evil people disrupting meetings," Yuan wrote. Such a person disrupted a Zoom meeting on sexual violence opens in new tab in the Bay Area last week. Yuan also addressed rumors about his own, and Zoom's, ties to China.
He said he had lived in the U. A reporter for London's Financial Times resigned after he was caught crashing internal Zoom meetings at rival London newspapers.
Mark Di Stefano announced his resignation on Twitter opens in new tab after The Independent opens in new tab documented how Di Stefano had last week joined an Independent staff meeting regarding pay cuts and furloughs, first under his own name, then anonymously.
Di Stefano cited his sources as "people on the call," The Independent said. The Independent also found that Di Stefano's cellphone had earlier been used to access a Zoom meeting at the Evening Standard, another London newspaper. That meeting was followed by a Financial Times piece about Evening Standard furloughs and pay cuts. Zoom isn't the only video-conferencing platform to have questionable privacy policies, Consumer Reports opens in new tab said in a blog post: Cisco Webex, Microsoft's Teams and Skype, and Google's Duo, Meet and Hangouts do too.
Consumer Reports said you should know that everything in a video meeting may be recorded, either by the host or another participant. It also recommended dialing into video-conference meetings over the phone, not creating accounts with the services if possible, and using "burner" email addresses otherwise. After prodding from reporters at The Verge opens in new tab , Zoom admitted that it did not in fact have a recent peak of million daily users, as stated in a blog post last week.
Rather, Zoom had a peak of million daily "participants. Researchers at Trend Micro spotted another Zoom installer file that had been corrupted with malware. In this case, it's spyware that can turn on the webcam, take screenshots and log keystrkes, as well as collecting diagnostic data about the system it's running on. It also installs a fully working version of the Zoom desktop client.
You don't need to install any software on your desktop to run Zoom. Zoom is a prime target for foreign spies, especially Chinese intelligence operatives, the Department of Homeland Security has warned U.
Foreign spies would be interested in any internet-based communications medium that saw such a steep increase in growth. But the DHS report singled out China as a likely meddler in Zoom security because Zoom has a substantial number of staffers in that country.
However, Zoom in the past week has given paid meeting hosts the option of avoiding Zoom servers in specific regions, including China and North America. Unpaid Zoom hosts will by default use only servers in their home regions. A new report from Mozilla , the non-profit maker of the Firefox web browser, says that Zoom's privacy and security policies and practices are better than those of Apple FaceTime.
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.
On Tuesday, Berkeley High School students were in the middle of a video conference when a man joined the Zoom meeting, exposed himself and shouted obscenities, the Mercury News reported.
The New York Times found scores of accounts on Instagram and on Reddit and 4Chan message boards where users coordinated to share meeting passwords and derail Zoom meetings. Generate a new ID for every meeting you launch using the options panel, instead of using your personal meeting ID.
You can toggle settings to ensure meeting participants need a password to access the meeting, which will further protect from disruption. Beginning April 4, Zoom enabled the Waiting Room feature by default, requiring additional password settings for free users. Zoom has a guide to the feature on its website. You can switch off a host of features that could be abused, if needed, including private chats, file transfers and custom backgrounds. The annotation feature, for example, could allow trolls to draw offensive shapes.
Zoom has a guide to host controls on its website. Keep your desktop app up to date, so that any patches Zoom makes to security vulnerabilities are added to your device. If you want to be extra careful, use Zoom only on a mobile device, such as an iPad or an Android phone, because these versions go through review in the app stores.
Signal and WhatsApp communications are encrypted end to end.
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