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. If you are unable to update, click on the Join from browser link in the prompt asking you to update.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. If you do not have the VPN installed and do not have administrative privileges or would like additional assistance getting started with VPN please call or email Academic Technology at: If you need assistance installing the VPN client on your computer Click the Scroll & Zoom tab and ensure that the Zoom in or out option is enabled.
If you do not have administrative privileges on a computer provided to you or maintained by Academic Technology
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