Is Zoom Safe to Use? Here's What You Need to Know - Simply fill in your details to request a free callback:
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Zoom privacy risks: The video chat app could be sharing more information than you think - CNET - Disadvantages and Risks Related to Zoom
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You should also avoid reusing meeting passwords. While you may find that the quality of your video call is better on the app, the web browser version gets security enhancements much faster. 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. When you click a link to join a meeting, your browser will open a new tab and prompt you to use or install the Zoom desktop software.
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. Crucially, that includes using third-party trackers and surveillance-based advertising — which if not selling your data is certainly sharing it.
Zoom has been hurriedly addressing the myriad security flaws that have been unearthed in recent weeks, which is perhaps a sign that its developers were, at best, careless. Unfortunately, the suddenness with which employees were requested to work from home meant that organisations needed quick solutions. Zoom has taken accountability for many of its security and privacy failings, which is always a positive step.
Likewise, it has implemented several controls to improve its security posture, such as password-protecting meetings by default and adding a waiting room feature, which allows the host to select who can enter a meeting. But perhaps the most important thing it did was to advise users on things they can do to stay safe. So, is Zoom secure or not?
Let's get straight to the point. For most organisations who have a decent degree of security measures in place, yes, Zoom is secure. But wait! Before you move on to another blog on our site, there is much more to the answer than a simple yes. Let me explain. The first question you should ask is what do you do? Are you in the arms manufacturing business for a special government unit? Are you discussing National Security Topics or extremely sensitive data that, if intercepted, could actually impact the country's security?
You get the point. If your topic of discussion is extremely sensitive and you don't want any interception then you should NOT be using Zoom. As a matter of fact, you should not be using any web conferencing solutions available. We may write another blog for suitable alternatives. Don't forget, most modern 'smart' devices are listening to your every word and in the case of Samsung, for example, they were absolutely open about it.
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.
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