Is zoom safe to download on computer. How to download Zoom on your PC for free in 4 simple steps
Looking for:
- Is zoom safe to download on computer
Download Center - Zoom - Is Zoom A Security Risk?
The service offers variable pricing plans , and thus, has been getting popular among businesses and individual users alike. Whether you want to connect with friends, colleagues, or clients, Zoom download is an excellent choice for your Windows PC. While the app comes with a wide range of features , Zoom Meetings has been the primary focus of the company. It lets you set up video calls and meetings in HD quality. Moreover, the communication tool lets you download textual transcripts of calls.
Paying members can even record videos of meetings and conferences for easy offline access. Compared to other popular video conferencing programs, Zoom is easier to set up.
Everything is displayed in large-sized icons, so you can easily access the options with the click of a button. On starting or joining a meeting, a new window pops up on the screen. Enjoying free air tickets, lounge?
Credit card-UPI linking has a doomy message for reward points. Choose your reason below and click on the Report button. This will alert our moderators to take action. Nifty 16, Zomato Ltd. Market Watch. Mutual Funds. Zoom has since updated its privacy policy , but the phrasing still gives the organisation room to use personal information in a variety of ways.
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. The outage, which began Sunday morning U. Even the British government's daily coronavirus briefing opens in new tab was affected, knocking out the ability of journalists to ask questions over Zoom.
Some users reported on Twitter that logging out of Zoom accounts, then logging back in, seemed to solve the issue. Zoom's status page noted that a backend update had taken place earlier Sunday morning, but there didn't seem to be any linkage between that update and the outage that began a few hours later. The Zoom status page opens in new tab said at the time that the outages "appear to be limited to a subset of users" and that Zoom was "working to identify the root cause and scope of this issue.
Cybercriminals may have registered hundreds of new Zoom-related website addresses in the past few weeks, according to researchers at Israeli security firm Check Point opens in new tab.
Many of these sites are being used in phishing attacks to grab victims' Zoom usernames and passwords, and similar scams are leveraging rival video-conferencing platforms such as Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. Over the weekend, online vandals hijacked the graduation ceremony at Oklahoma City University opens in new tab , replacing the Zoom video feed with racist language and symbols. It wasn't immediately clear whether this was a result of regular Zoom-bombing or if the attackers used less well-known methods to disrupt the video feed.
Zoom announced May 7 opens in new tab that due to its technical-support staff being overwhelmed with calls, it would be able to give personal technical assistance only to "owners and administrators" of paid accounts.
In other words, any user, owner or administrator of a free Zoom account, and end users of paid accounts, won't be entitled to human help. Instead, they'll have to rely on the FAQs and how-to's list on the Zoom online resources opens in new tab page.
For now, this provision applies only to May and June If the coronavirus lockdown last longer than that, Zoom may have to hire more tech-support staffers. New York State Attorney General Letitia James' office reached an agreement with Zoom opens in new tab May 7 following an investigation into Zoom's security and privacy practices.
There isn't a lot of new stuff in the agreement. Most of the stipulations Zoom agreed to are things the company is already doing, including making passwords mandatory and using better encryption. In the long term, Zoom has to conduct regular code reviews and conduct yearly penetration-testing exercises, in which paid hackers try to break through the company's defenses. Only two new things will directly affect consumers. It also has to update its Acceptable Use policies to ban "abusive conduct include hatred against others based on race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, gender, or sexual orientation.
Frankly, these are longstanding standard policies at many other online companies, so we're a little surprised that they weren't already Zoom policies. Yuan announced opens in new tab. The purchase price or other terms of the deal were not disclosed. Keybase makes user-friendly software to easily and securely encrypt messaging and social media posts.
In March, Zoom had to admit that its touted "end-to-end" encryption was not the real thing because Zoom's own servers are always able to access the contents of meetings. Once Keybase's technology is incorporated, that will no longer always be the case. Meeting passwords and waiting rooms will be required by default for all Zoom meetings, free or paid, beginning May 9, Zoom announced. Only hosts will be able to share their screens by default, but like the other settings, that can be changed.
Yuan said the massive increase in Zoom usage since the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown had been "challenging," but also provided "opportunities for us to drive meaningful change and improvement. Yuan admitted that "we failed to set pre-configured security features for our new customers, especially for schools," referring to meeting passwords and waiting rooms.
That resulted in "uninvited, offensive, and sometimes even truly evil people disrupting meetings," Yuan wrote. Such a person disrupted a Zoom meeting on sexual violence opens in new tab in the Bay Area last week.
Yuan also addressed rumors about his own, and Zoom's, ties to China. He said he had lived in the U. A reporter for London's Financial Times resigned after he was caught crashing internal Zoom meetings at rival London newspapers.
Mark Di Stefano announced his resignation on Twitter opens in new tab after The Independent opens in new tab documented how Di Stefano had last week joined an Independent staff meeting regarding pay cuts and furloughs, first under his own name, then anonymously. Di Stefano cited his sources as "people on the call," The Independent said. The Independent also found that Di Stefano's cellphone had earlier been used to access a Zoom meeting at the Evening Standard, another London newspaper.
That meeting was followed by a Financial Times piece about Evening Standard furloughs and pay cuts. Zoom isn't the only video-conferencing platform to have questionable privacy policies, Consumer Reports opens in new tab said in a blog post: Cisco Webex, Microsoft's Teams and Skype, and Google's Duo, Meet and Hangouts do too. Consumer Reports said you should know that everything in a video meeting may be recorded, either by the host or another participant.
It also recommended dialing into video-conference meetings over the phone, not creating accounts with the services if possible, and using "burner" email addresses otherwise. After prodding from reporters at The Verge opens in new tab , Zoom admitted that it did not in fact have a recent peak of million daily users, as stated in a blog post last week.
Rather, Zoom had a peak of million daily "participants. Researchers at Trend Micro spotted another Zoom installer file that had been corrupted with malware. In this case, it's spyware that can turn on the webcam, take screenshots and log keystrkes, as well as collecting diagnostic data about the system it's running on.
It also installs a fully working version of the Zoom desktop client. You don't need to install any software on your desktop to run Zoom. Zoom is a prime target for foreign spies, especially Chinese intelligence operatives, the Department of Homeland Security has warned U.
Foreign spies would be interested in any internet-based communications medium that saw such a steep increase in growth. But the DHS report singled out China as a likely meddler in Zoom security because Zoom has a substantial number of staffers in that country. However, Zoom in the past week has given paid meeting hosts the option of avoiding Zoom servers in specific regions, including China and North America.
Unpaid Zoom hosts will by default use only servers in their home regions. A new report from Mozilla , the non-profit maker of the Firefox web browser, says that Zoom's privacy and security policies and practices are better than those of Apple FaceTime. FaceTime got only 4. A new Zoom phishing scam is sure to get the attention of anyone working from home during the coronavirus lockdown.
It seems to come from your employer's HR department, and invites you to join a Zoom meeting starting in a few minutes to discuss possible termination of your employment. If you click on the link in the email to join the meeting, you're taken to a very real-looking Zoom login page.
It's fake. If you enter your credentials, then the crooks can take over your Zoom account. Zoom has finally updated its meeting-client software to version 5. Here's our guide on how to update to Zoom 5.
The update is not yet available for iOS, as Apple has to vet the software before the new version of the app can be pushed out. We also couldn't see in the Google Play app store as of Monday afternoon Eastern time April 27 , but odds are it will appear soon.
No other company may have benefited more from the stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus crisis. To put that in perspective, daily usage peaked at million people per day in March, the company said on April 1 opens in new tab. In December , Zoom usage peaked at 10 million daily users. The new version will include many of the security fixes we've recently seen for the Zoom web interface, including the abilities to kick out Zoom bombers from meetings, make sure meeting data doesn't go through China, and put everyone waiting for a meeting in a "waiting room.
We checked the Zoom changelogs opens in new tab and discovered that the update won't be available until Sunday, April Cisco Talos researchers said Zoom's meeting chat function made it too easy for outsiders to find all Zoom users in an particular organization. If you had a valid Zoom account, Cisco Talos explained in a blog post opens in new tab , you could pretend that you worked at any organization and get the full names and chat IDs of every registered Zoom user whose email address used that organization's email domain.
You would not have to verify that you worked there, and you wouldn't even need to be in a Zoom meeting to get the information.
That information "could be leveraged to disclose further contact information including the user's email address, phone number and any other information that is present in their vCard," or digital business card, Cisco Talos wrote. In a blog post opens in new tab April 20, Zoom said the option of excluding certain countries from call routing was now live.
This will let Zoom meeting administrators avoid having meeting data routed through Zoom servers in China, the U. New updates to the Zoom platform opens in new tab for the web interface rolled out April 19 include masking some participant personal information, such as email addresses or phone numbers, during meetings.
Another change is that users who share the same email domain will no longer be able to search for each other by name. The New York Times opens in new tab reported that Dropbox executives were so concerned about security flaws in Zoom that in Dropbox created its own secret bug-bounty program for Zoom flaws. In other words, Dropbox would pay hackers for security vulnerabilities they found in Zoom.
Dropbox staffers used Zoom regularly, and Dropbox was an investor in Zoom. The Times reported that Dropbox would confirm the flaws, then pass them along to Zoom so that Zoom could fix them.
Zoom-meeting video recordings saved on Zoom's cloud servers can be easily discovered and often viewed, a security researcher told Cnet opens in new tab.
Phil Guimond opens in new tab noticed that online recordings of Zoom meetings have a predictable URL structure and are thus easy to find. The Washington Post reported last week on a similar issue with Zoom recordings that had been uploaded by users to third-party cloud servers.
In those cases, the file names of meeting recordings followed a predictable pattern. Until Zoom pushed out a series of updates opens in new tab this past Tuesday, Zoom meeting recordings were not required to be password-protected.
Guimond built a simple tool that automatically searches for Zoom meeting recordings and tries to open them. If a meeting has a password, his tool tries to brute-force access by running through millions of possible passwords. Zoom took off over other platforms like Microsoft Teams and Google Meet due to its easy setup, useability, free meetings for up to people. So, one year on, is Zoom finally safe to use? Read on to find out. At the end of last year, the Better Business Bureau warned Zoom users that scammers were trying to steal their usernames and passwords via phishing emails and text messages.
The messages, designed to cause panic, warned that "your Zoom account has been suspended" or that "you missed a meeting," and offer a helpful link to log back in. 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.
Comments
Post a Comment