Zoom Knows Everything About You

Zoom have currently been receiving a lot of backlash due to the various security problems that have been found by users. It has been discovered that Zoom uses information provided by users, and then sells that data to Facebook for marketing purposes.

Users have not been made aware that their data would be processed and sold to third party companies upon installing the application. Whilst they could be acquitted for using our data for marketing and business purposes, it has been discovered that the application has further proven to show a lot of security breaches.

China is a country that openly condones and conducts surveillance operations around their country, yet Zoom, an American company, have servers in China.

Chinese servers in Zoom mean that users of Zoom can be connected to Chinese servers if a more localised server is not located. The company came out with a statement saying that they mistakenly added those servers to the Zoom application, and that only a very limited number of users will be bypassed through a Chinese server.

This means that the few people who connect with Chinese servers, will be able to be spied on by the Chinese government despite the user not being a citizen.

Furthermore, a study went into Zoom’s installer client which discovered faults in the source code that created fake system prompts. These types of fake prompts are mostly made by common malware found in the MacOS.

This malicious behaviour is being questioned by many. However, Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, simply had to say that these fake prompts were added because: “To join a meeting from a Mac is not easy”.

Another reason why Zoom is under a lot of backlash, is due to their promised end-to-end encryption. This is due to the data being sent through the servers, are actually decrypted by an AES-128 key.

The issue here is that these AES keys can easily be hacked into by intruders and even governments. This means that any data you shared in a Zoom meeting, can be accessed by a hacker or the government.

News Scoop suggests you use a Virtual Machine (go to www.vmware.com) when using Zoom, and advises that you do not share personal information on it. A virtual machine will essentially create another computer device within the device you are already using. This new machine will not contain any information from your original device.

In a case of your machine connections having to go through Chinese servers or being hijacked by hackers, there will be no information to be taken, and all of your personal data from your original devices will be inaccessible to everyone.

Although there are severe malware that are able to penetrate through virtual machines onto the authentic devices, so it is still important to make sure that you do not share personal data on the application. For more information on how to stay safe on Zoom, read the following tips by Kaspersky security.

By Siva Raghuraman