Is Zoom Safe to Use? Here's What You Need to Know
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- Zoom security issues: What's gone wrong and what's been fixed | Tom's Guide
Privacy and security are top of mind for us at Zoom. Find resources and learn how Zoom works to secure your data and protect your privacy. This content is protected during transit with bit Advanced Encryption Standard AES using a one-time key for that specific session when all participants use a Zoom client.
End-to-end Encryption, when enabled, ensures that communication between all meeting participants in узнать больше здесь given meeting is encrypted using cryptographic keys known only to the devices of those participants. Advanced Chat Encryptionwhen enabled, allows for a secured communication where only the intended recipient can read the secured message. Zoom uses both is zoom.om safe to download and symmetric algorithms to encrypt the chat session. Private keys are generated on the device and not shared.
This ensures that the session cannot be eavesdropped on or tampered with. Audio Signature embeds a user's personal information into the audio as an inaudible watermark if they record during a meeting.
If the audio file is shared without permission, Zoom can help identify which participant recorded the meeting. Users authenticating with username and password can also is zoom.om safe to download two-factor authentication 2FA is zoom.om safe to download an additional layer of security to sign in. Zoom can map attributes to provision a user to a different group with feature controls. Zoom also offers an API call to pre-provision users from any database backend.
Additionally, your organization or university can add users to your account automatically with managed domains. Once your managed domain application is approved, all existing and new users with your email address domain will be added to your account. Visit our Security Resources for more information.
If you think you have found a security vulnerability in Zoom, please visit our Vulnerability Disclosure Policy. Security at Zoom. See why millions of people is zoom.om safe to download organizations trust us with their communications. Security Overview Privacy and security are top of mind for us at Zoom. Protecting your meetings The following in-meeting security capabilities are available to the meeting host:.
Security Resources Visit our Security Resources for more information. Security questions or issues?
- Is Zoom safe to use? Here's what you need to know - Los Angeles Times
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. Anyone can "bomb" a public Zoom meeting if they know the meeting number, and then use the file-share photo to post shocking images, or make annoying sounds in the audio.
The FBI even warned about it opens in new tab a few days ago. The host of the Zoom meeting can mute or even kick out troublemakers, but they can come right back with new user IDs. The best way to avoid Zoom bombing is to not share Zoom meeting numbers with anyone but the intended participants.
You can also require participants to use a password to log into the meeting. On April 3, the U. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Michigan said that "anyone who hacks into a teleconference can be charged with state or federal crimes. Zoom automatically puts everyone sharing the same email domain into a "company" folder where they can see each other's information. Exceptions are made for people using large webmail clients such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or Outlook.
Several Dutch Zoom users who use ISP-provided email addresses suddenly found that they were in the same "company" with dozens of strangers -- and could see their email addresses, user names and user photos.
STATUS: Unresolved, but an April 19 Zoom software update opens in new tab for Zoom web-interface users makes sure users on the same email domain can no longer automatically search for each other by name.
The Zoom desktop client software will get similar fixes April Several privacy experts, some working for Consumer Reports, pored over Zoom's privacy policy and found that it apparently gave Zoom the right to use Zoom users' personal data and to share it with third-party marketers. Following a Consumer Reports opens in new tab blog post, Zoom quickly rewrote its privacy policy, stripping out the most disturbing passages and asserting that "we do not sell your personal data.
We don't know the details of Zoom's business dealings with third-party advertisers. You can find open Zoom meetings opens in new tab by rapidly cycling through possible Zoom meeting IDs, a security researcher told independent security blogger Brian Krebs. The researcher got past Zoom's meeting-scan blocker by running queries through Tor, which randomized his IP address.
It's a variation on "war driving" by randomly dialing telephone numbers to find open modems in the dial-up days. The researcher told Krebs that he could find about open Zoom meetings every hour with the tool, and that "having a password enabled on the [Zoom] meeting is the only thing that defeats it.
Two Twitter opens in new tab users opens in new tab pointed out that if you're in a Zoom meeting and use a private window in the meeting's chat app to communicate privately with another person in the meeting, that conversation will be visible in the end-of-meeting transcript the host receives.
A Kurdish security researcher opens in new tab said Zoom paid him a bug bounty -- a reward for finding a serious flaw -- for finding how to hijack a Zoom account if the account holder's email address was known or guessed. The researcher, who calls himself "s3c" but whose real name may be Yusuf Abdulla, said if he tried to log into Zoom with a Facebook account, Zoom would ask for the email address associated with that Facebook account.
Then Zoom would open a new webpage notifying him that a confirmation email message had been sent to that email address. The URL of the notification webpage would have a unique identification tag in the address bar.
As an example that's much shorter than the real thing, let's say it's "zoom. When s3c received and opened the confirmation email message sent by Zoom, he clicked on the confirmation button in the body of the message. This took him to yet another webpage that confirmed his email address was now associated with a new account. So far, so good. But then s3c noticed that the unique identification tag in the Zoom confirmation webpage's URL was identical to the first ID tag.
Let's use the example "zoom. The matching ID tags, one used before confirmation and the other after confirmation, meant that s3c could have avoided receiving the confirmation email, and clicking on the confirmation button, altogether.
In fact, he could have entered ANY email address -- yours, mine or billgates gmail. Then he could have copied the ID tag from the resulting Zoom notification page and pasted the ID tag into an already existing Zoom account-confirmation page. And because Zoom lets anyone using a company email address view all other users signed up with the same email domain, e. Zoom is fortunate that s3c is one of the good guys and didn't disclose this flaw publicly before Zoom could fix it. But it's such a simple flaw that it's hard to imagine no one else noticed it before.
Zoom has released updates for its Windows , macOS and Linux desktop client software so that meeting IDs will not display onscreen during meetings. Yuan opens in new tab said that Zoom had discovered "a potential security vulnerability with file sharing, so we disabled that feature. Until this week, participants in a Zoom meeting could share files with each other using the meeting's chat function. Those AES encryption keys are issued to Zoom clients by Zoom servers, which is all well and good, except that the Citizen Lab opens in new tab found several Zoom servers in China issuing keys to Zoom users even when all participants in a meeting were in North America.
Since Zoom servers can decrypt Zoom meetings, and Chinese authorities can compel operators of Chinese servers to hand over data, the implication is that the Chinese government might be able to see your Zoom meetings. That's got to be bad news for the British government, which has held at least one Cabinet meeting over Zoom. Yuan opens in new tab responded to the Citizen Lab report by saying that "it is possible certain meetings were allowed to connect to systems in China, where they should not have been able to connect.
We have since corrected this. Zoom advises meeting hosts to set up "waiting rooms" to avoid "Zoom bombing. The Citizen Lab said it found a serious security issue with Zoom waiting rooms opens in new tab , and advised hosts and participants to not use them for now.
The Citizen Lab is not disclosing the details yet, but has told Zoom of the flaw. In a follow-up to their initial report opens in new tab.
Zoom meetings have side chats in which participants can sent text-based messages and post web links. That left Zoom chats vulnerable to attack. If a malicious Zoom bomber slipped a UNC path to a remote server that he controlled into a Zoom meeting chat, an unwitting participant could click on it.
The participant's Windows computer would then try to reach out to the hacker's remote server specified in the path and automatically try to log into it using the user's Windows username and password. The hacker could capture the password "hash" and decrypt it, giving him access to the Zoom user's Windows account.
Mohamed A. Baset opens in new tab of security firm Seekurity said on Twitter that the same filepath flaw also would let a hacker insert a UNC path to a remote executable file into a Zoom meeting chatroom.
If a Zoom user running Windows clicked on it, a video posted by Baset showed, the user's computer would try to load and run the software.
The victim would be prompted to authorize the software to run, which will stop some hacking attempts but not all. After Vice News exposed the practice, Zoom said it hadn't been aware of the profile-sharing and updated the iOS apps to fix this. We learned last summer that Zoom used hacker-like methods to bypass normal macOS security precautions. We thought that problem had been fixed then, along with the security flaw it created. But a series of tweets March 30 from security researcher Felix Seele, who noticed that Zoom installed itself on his Mac without the usual user authorizations, revealed that there was still an issue.
The same tricks that are being used by macOS malware. Yuan opens in new tab tweeted a friendly response. That was a swift and comprehensive reaction. Zoom just released an update for the macOS installer which completely removes the questionable "preinstall"-technique and the faked password prompt. I must say that I am impressed. Other people could use Zoom's dodgy Mac installation methods, renowned Mac hacker Patrick Wardle opens in new tab said in a blog post March Wardle demonstrated how a local attacker -- such as a malicious human or already-installed malware -- could use Zoom's formerly magical powers of unauthorized installation to "escalate privileges" and gain total control over the machine without knowing the administrator password.
Wardle also showed that a malicious script installed into the Zoom Mac client could give any piece of malware Zoom's webcam and microphone privileges, which do not prompt the user for authorization and could turn any Mac with Zoom installed into a potential spying device. Yuan opens in new tab acknowledged Zoom's growing pains and pledged that regular development of the Zoom platform would be put on hold while the company worked to fix security and privacy issues.
Dedicated journalists and security researchers have also helped to identify pre-existing ones. To deal with these issues, Yuan wrote, Zoom would be "enacting a feature freeze, effectively immediately, and shifting all our engineering resources to focus on our biggest trust, safety, and privacy issues. Among other things, Zoom would also be "conducting a comprehensive review with third-party experts and representative users to understand and ensure the security of all of our new consumer use cases.
Zoom now requires passwords by default for most Zoom meetings, although meetings hosts can turn that feature off. Passwords are the easiest way to stop Zoom bombing. And on April 8, former Facebook and Yahoo chief security officer Alex Stamos opens in new tab said he would be working with Zoom to improve its security and privacy. Stamos is now an adjunct professor at Stanford and is highly regarded within the information-security community.
Zoom claims its meetings use "end-to-end encryption" if every participant calls in from a computer or a Zoom mobile app instead of over the phone. But under pressure from The Intercept opens in new tab , a Zoom representative admitted that Zoom's definitions of "end-to-end" and "endpoint" are not the same as everyone else's.
Every other company considers an endpoint to be a user device -- a desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet -- but not a server. And every other company takes "end-to-end encryption" to mean that servers that relay messages from one endpoint to another can't decrypt the messages. When you send an Apple Message from your iPhone to another iPhone user, Apple's servers help the message get from one place to another, but they can't read the content. Not so with Zoom. It can see whatever is going on in its meetings, and sometimes it may have to in order to make sure everything works properly.
Just don't believe the implication that it can't. UPDATE: In a blog post April 1, Zoom Chief Product Officer Oded Gal opens in new tab wrote that "we want to start by apologizing for the confusion we have caused by incorrectly suggesting that Zoom meetings were capable of using end-to-end encryption. Gal assured users that all data sent and received by Zoom client applications but not regular phone lines, business conferencing systems or, presumably, browser interfaces is indeed encrypted and that Zoom servers or staffers "do not decrypt it at any point before it reaches the receiving clients.
However, Gal added, "Zoom currently maintains the key management system for these systems in the cloud" but has "implemented robust and validated internal controls to prevent unauthorized access to any content that users share during meetings.
The implication is that Zoom doesn't decrypt user transmissions by choice. But because it holds the encryption keys, Zoom could if it had to, such as if it were presented with a warrant or a U. National Security Letter essentially a secret warrant. For those worried about government snooping, Gal wrote that "Zoom has never built a mechanism to decrypt live meetings for lawful intercept purposes, nor do we have means to insert our employees or others into meetings without being reflected in the participant list.
He added that companies and other enterprises would soon be able to handle their own encryption process. We hope Zoom stops using the term "end-to-end encryption" incorrectly, but just keep in mind that you won't be getting the real thing with Zoom until it fully implements the technology it's buying with Keybase. Privacy researcher Patrick Jackson noticed that Zoom meeting recordings saved to the host's computer generally get a certain type of file name. So he searched unprotected cloud servers to see if anyone had uploaded Zoom recordings and found more than 15, unprotected examples, according to The Washington Post opens in new tab.
Jackson also found some recorded Zoom meetings on YouTube and Vimeo. This isn't really Zoom's fault. It's up to the host to decide whether to record a meeting, and Zoom gives paying customers the option to store recordings on Zoom's own servers. It's also up to the host to decide to change the recording's file name. If you host a Zoom meeting and decide to record it, then make sure you change the default file name after you're done.
Paul Wagenseil is a senior editor at Tom's Guide focused on security and privacy. He has also been a dishwasher, fry cook, long-haul driver, code monkey and video editor. He's been rooting around in the information-security space for more than 15 years at FoxNews.
Tom's Guide Tom's Guide. Paul Wagenseil opens in new tab. Topics Privacy. Do it! The setting can be made permanent in Houseparty, or you can just tap the lock icon at the bottom of the screen when you begin your call. For Zoom, you can require a password to enter the meeting. In a blog post on March 27, Zoom suggested that teachers keep their virtual classrooms locked , so no one else can join.
Software updates often clean up security issues, so always use the latest version of all of the software, regardless of whether you are on your laptop or mobile device. Zoom, like many other videoconferencing tools, allows meetings to be recorded.
By law, you have to be informed if a call is being recorded, unless you live in a one party consent state , in which case only person on the call needs to be aware of the recording. Zoom is undergoing a lot of growing pains right now, thanks to its newfound popularity, but it's working to ensure better transparency when it comes to your data privacy. If you want to keep tonight's Zoom date on the calendar, you might want to lock the door behind you.
By Kaitlyn Wylde. Make A Freestanding Account, Always. See All Health Relationships Self. 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. WhatsApp allows encrypted calls with as many as four people. This is a suitable option for highly sensitive conversations. Microsoft also offers powerful web, audio and video conferencing tools through its Microsoft Teams platform. Zoom is one of the platforms people have ubiquitously adopted to replace these in-person interactions amid the coronavirus outbreak. And it works relatively well.
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