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Zoom's popularity has soared, largely thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. In December , it reported 10 million users. By April , that rose to million. Its stock price increased by more than percent over the course of the year. It has now become an essential app for businesses, groups of socially-distant friends, and even entire families.
But is Zoom safe? Stories about the app's security and privacy issues have been lurking throughout its rise. Let's take a closer look at some of the biggest Zoom security concerns you need to know about. Yes, Zoom-bombing is a thing. 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.
To protect yourself, make sure you only ever download Zoom from the company's official site. When you hear the phrase "leaked passwords," you probably assume the service provider is at fault.
However, in this example, Zoom is not to blame. 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. Secondly, Zoom is now the most popular video conferencing app by some distance. All the people you want to talk to will be on the platform. Much like leaving Facebook or WhatsApp, you won't be able to enjoy the same level of communication with friends and colleagues if you use a different app.
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Zoom: One year on, is it safe to use?
Users authenticating with username and password can also enable two-factor authentication 2FA as 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. Although Zoom is well known and used by many, it's surely not the only video conferencing app.
It would be best if you thought twice about sticking with Zoom for the following reasons. You might be surprised by Zoom's data collection policies if you haven't taken the time to review them. They collect and share email addresses, as well as information uploaded during video conferences and chats. It's even worse if you signed up for Zoom through your Facebook or Google account, which gives Zoom access to any data collected by those companies.
Although Zoom offers a form of end-to-end encryption E2EE for your meetings, it isn't enabled by default. 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. Our Cyber Incident Response service provides the help you need to deal with the threat, as our experts guide you through the recovery process. But software vulnerabilities are just one of the many issues you should be concerned about.
And do they understand the dangers of phishing scams? Luke Irwin is a writer for IT Governance. Until recently, you had probably never heard of the video conferencing software Zoom.
By clicking the link you would be taken to a fake login page designed to capture your Zoom user credentials, allowing hackers to use or steal your Zoom account. In a move to combat these intruders, Zoom released two features:. In May last year, Zoom finally announced their plans to build an actual E2EE meeting option into their platform, during 4 phases.
So, while Zoom has begun to roll out their E2EE service, it's not in full swing just yet. 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.
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 flak from security experts over privacy concerns. However, Zoom has been involved in multiple lawsuits over the last year. In , Zoom secretly installed a web server on Macs that let websites spy on users and re-installed the Zoom meeting software even after the user had deleted the program.
And it told customers that recorded meetings stored on Zoom servers would immediately be encrypted, which wasn't always true.
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