While the pandemic of COVID-19 has forced many to work from home solutions, the Chinese-American Businessman Eric Yuan founded company Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (Zoom) has witnessed a spike in its daily traffic. The analytics firm SimilarWeb says the company has witnessed a huge 535% rise in its daily traffic within a month.
Although, this setup has its usefulness in video conferencing and maintaining social distancing, unfortunately, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the tool in recent times to spread malware. Researchers have found a Coinminer bundled with the legitimate installer of the video conferencing app Zoom. A certain Trojan.Win32.MOOZ.THCCABO is dropped into the user’s system who downloads the installer from anywhere other than the official website of Zoom. This Trojan actively gathers System Information such as the OS version, access to Video Controller, Processors, and Smartscreen, and targets Windows Defender and sends the gathered information to https://{BLOCKED}o.co/1IRnc.
Other than that, many of the top security researchers have called Zoom “a privacy disaster” and
“fundamentally corrupt”. Motherboard reportedly accused Zoom of sending data users of its iOS app to Facebook even if the user does not have a Facebook account. Whatever Zoom says in its defense, this report has already been verily cited in a lawsuit filed in a federal court in California.
Not to forget, even the FBI has declared of its investigations on the rising cases of
video-hijacking on this platform, which it has called “Zoom-bombing”. Further, the mysterious app has been falsely advertising itself as using end-to-end encryption, a system that is used to secure communications so that it cannot be read by hijackers. Zoom has failed on many levels to prove itself reliable just when we need it the most. However, it is worrisome that the platform is being used by some of the top officials and government portals all over the world.
