Work still means meetings, and meetings still mean people.
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But with the coronavirus pandemic having caused many countries to define a “group” as a maximum of two people, and prohibiting people from meeting up face-to-face anyway, even with friends and family, then meeting with people means an online meeting.
For very many of us, that means Zoom, not least because many of us were using Zoom already, and happily, and…
…or so we thought, safely.
Hi, I was wondering if someone can help me go in the right direction. We have recently installed a Sophos XG firewall and we have come across an issue where users are unable to log into a zoom meeting via a the LAN connection using a proxy. Applies to: Sophos Home Premium (Windows and Mac) Webcam protection (available on Windows and Mac) is a Sophos Home feature that alerts you of unwanted use of your webcam. This feature is enabled by default. Mic protection (available on Mac only) is a Sophos Home feature that alerts you of unwanted use of your microphone. This feature is enabled by default.
But Zoom has had a bunch of security scares recently, as huge numbers of new users flock to it, and as crooks and miscreants try to take advantage of that.
Fortunately, a lot of the problems and risks people are having can be reduced enormously just by getting the basics right.
Unfortunately, a lot of the habits that existing Zoom users have fallen into need to change.
Insecure shortcuts – ways of using Zoom that the old-timers have inadvertently been teaching to the Zoom newcomers – didn’t seem to matter that much before, but they do now.
So here are our top 5 “things to get right first” – they shouldn’t take you long, and they are easy to do.
1. Patch early, patch often
Zoom’s own CEO just wrote a blog post announcing a “feature freeze” in the product so that the company can focus on security issues instead. It’s much easier to do that if you aren’t adding new code at the same time.
Why not get into the habit of checking you’re up-to-date every day, before your first meeting? Even if Zoom itself told you about an update the very last time you used it, get in the habit of checking by hand anyway, just to be sure. It doesn’t take long.
By the way, we recommend you do this with all your software – even if you have been using your operating system’s or an app’s autoupdating for years and it’s always been on time, a manual cross-check is quick and easy.
Zoom’s guide is here: Where do I download the latest version?
2. Use the Waiting Room option
Set up meetings so that the participants can’t join in until you open it up.
Download wifi hotspot for mac. And if you suddenly find yourself “on hold until the organiser starts the meeting” when in the past you would have spent the time chatting to your colleagues and getting the smalltalk over with, don’t complain – those pre-meeting meetings are great for socialising but they do make it harder to control the meeting.
Zoom has a dedicated article on the Waiting Room feature.
3. Take control over screen sharing
Until recently, most Zoom meetings (or at least the ones we attended in the not-too-distant era before coronavirus) took a liberal approach to screen sharing.
But the term ZoomBombing entered our vocabulary very forcefully about two weeks ago, when a public “Happy Hour” meeting that was supposed to buoy everyone’s morale turned into an HR nightmare when one of the participants, who had entered under a false name, started sharing pornographic filth. (Unhappily for the organiser of the meeting, he’d chosen that day to invite his parents along as guests of honour.)
Actually, it’s not just screen sharing that can cause trouble. There are numerous controls you can apply to participants in meetings, including blocking file sharing and private chat, kicking out disruptive users, and stopping troublemakers coming back.
Zoom has a dedicated article on Managing participants in a meeting.
4. Use random meeting IDs or set meeting passwords
We know lots of Zoom users who memorised their own personal meeting ID long ago and have fallen into the habit of using it for every meeting they hold – even back-to-back meetings with different groups.
But that convenience is handy for crooks, too, because they already have a list of known IDs that they can try automatically in the hope of wandering in where they aren’t supposed to be.
We recommend using a randomly generated meeting ID, or setting a password on any meetings using your personal ID that are not explicitly open to all. You can send the web link by one means, e.g. in an email or invitation request, and the password by another means, e.g. in an instant message just before the meeting starts. (You can also lock meetings once they start to avoid gaining unwanted visitors after you’ve started concentrating on the meeting itself.)
Cisco packet tracer 7.1 free download for mac. Zoom has a dedicated article on Meeting and webinar passwords.
5. Make some rules of etiquette and stick to them.
Etiquette may sound like a strange bedfellow for cybersecurity, and perhaps it is.
But respect for privacy, a sense of trust, and a feeling of social and business comfort are also important parts of a working life that’s now dominated by online meetings.
If you’re expected or you need to use video, pay attention to your appearance and the lighting. (In very blunt terms: try to avoid being a pain to watch.) Remember to use the mute button when you can.
And most importantly – especially if there are company outsiders in the meeting – be very clear up front if you will be recording the meeting, even if you are in a jurisdiction that does not require you to declare it. And make it clear if they are any restrictions, albeit informal ones, about what the participants are allowed to do with the information they learn in the meeting.
Etiquette isn’t about keeping the bad guys out. But respectful rules of engagement for remote meetings help to make it easy for everyone in the meeting to keep the good stuff in.
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The annual Pwn2Own contest features live hacking where top cybersecurity researchers duke it out under time pressure for huge cash prizes.
Zoom Sophos
Their quest: to prove that the exploits they claim to have discovered really do work under real-life conditions.
Indeed, Pwn2Own is a bug bounty program with a twist.
Http://sophos.zoom.us
The end result is still responsible disclosure, where the affected vendor gets a chance to fix any flaws before they are made public, but the bug hunters don’t just submit their bug descriptions with a list of instructions for the vendor to follow and investigate.
The competitors are faced with a standardised, patched, vanilla configuration of the system they’re targeting, set up for them on hardware they didn’t choose theselves, and they have just 20 minutes in which to complete their attack during the competition.
That means there is very little time to adjust, adapt, rethink and rewrite code during the timed part of the event itself, so this really is a showcase for meticulous research, scrupulous preparation, careful rehearsal…
…mixed with a dash of je ne sais quoi Quicken for mac free download crack. and a dose of plain old luck.
The “plain old luck” factor exists because the participants do their demonstrations one after another over three days, with the order chosen randomly just before the competition starts.
If two teams show up with the same exploit, and both of those exploits succeed within the allotted time, then the winner isn’t the one who can prove they found it first during their research phase, but the one who just happened to get the earlier demonstration slot in the draw.
Clearly, the earlier the slot you draw, the less likely you are to get scooped by someone else who just happened to have found the same bug as you.
Greetz from Texas
Traditionally, the North American Pwn2Own event has taken place alongside the annual CanSecWest security conference held in Vancouver, Canada, but this year the official host city was Austin, Texas.
For obvious reasons, the actual hacking teams were distributed all over the world, rather than all travelling to meet in one place.
The full results for 2021 can be found on the Pwn2Own blog, including those who tried but failed, or those who tried but didn’t win any money because some part of their exploit chain was already known.
In some cases, competitors lost out because their exploits had been reported to the vendor before the competition by someone else, but not yet publicly disclosed; in other cases, they lost out simply through the bad luck of drawing a later slot in the competition than other participants who had brought along and exploited the same bugs.
We’ve listed the money-winning entries below – note that this year’s prize money totalled a very healthy $1.21 million!
The prize hierarchy looked like this:
- $200k for code execution on a server or messaging platform
- $100k for code execution via a browser
- $40k for breaking out of a virtualised guest OS into the host OS
- $40k for “getting root” (more properly, SYSTEM) on Windows 10
- $30k for “getting root” on Linux
Sophos Zoom Meeting
In case you are wondering, EoP below is short for elevation of privilege, which means exactly what it says: it doesn’t get you into a system in the first place, but it does gets you up to superpower level once you’re in.
Interestingly, there was a tenth product that was attacked in the competition, but that doesn’t show up in the list above because it remained unpwned within the allotted time: Oracle’s VirtualBox virtualisation software.
See you next year!
Congratulations to everyone who took part…
…and good news for all the rest of us, because all the bugs that were painstakingly uncovered, understood and used in the attacks above – and note that many attacks required a number of different exploits to be unleashed in a specfic sequence – will now all be fixed.
To learn more about vulnerabilities and how attackers chain them together for more devastating results, listen to our Understanding Vulnerabilities podcast below:
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