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Comment by luma | Hacker News Reader

Shitting on zoom in your headline appears to be this week's low latency path to more clicks, no matter how contrived the claim is.

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I am very weary of angry mobs but I have to say that it looks to me like Zoom needs to be called out on some of these practices.

Personally, the fact that I filled out what turns out to not be a system dialog with my password (https://twitter.com/raganwald/status/1244994636982222848) makes me feel violated.

Wow. They literally just phished me. I was distracted while installing Zoom and didn't look too carefully.

I'm genuinely quite angry about this. I never enter passwords into 3rd party apps - I've had arguments with companies who embed oAuth flows into their app about this.

If it’s any consolation, they didn’t get your password.

How so?

Excuse my ignorance here, then what is the purpose of the fake system dialog?

It's a real system dialog popped by the OS when the install script requests superuser privileges. It's not fake, and the password goes to the OS, not the script.

Why is it ungrammatical then? (serious question, i take that as a sign that it is not a real OS dialogue)

Because the text displayed in the dialog is specified by the caller.

So the tweet is mistaken? How do you know this?

You are the first person I've seen to know enough about the OSX APIs to know that it is real. I went back to look at the twitter thread and only saw (certainly could've overlooked) one person who was saying that it is real.

Thanks for clearing that up, though I must say they (Zoom) bring this upon themselves by having such a poorly worded dialog.

Maybe try to read the blog post https://objective-see.com/blog/blog_0x56.html instead of a Twitter thread. People trying to glean information from truncated 140-char messages (often written in the most attention-grabbing way possible) is one of the main reasons why Twitter is full of misinformation.

I've tried googling and didn't see any blog posts. 140 chars is certainly enough for someone to link that :). Anyway, thank you for making me and others aware of this blog.

The blog post is linked to in the article being discussed and honestly would be a better link.

From the HN guidelines: Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Maybe try to read the blog post" can be easily replaced with a less patronizing and just as informative "It's in this blog post".

You have good points to make, they don't need the vitriol to be taken.

I was responding to a comment that explicitly said they couldn’t find the information in the Twitter thread.

I was clearly also making a meta-comment about Twitter misinformation, so the patronizing part was inevitable.

Thanks for this link - I found it a much more technically interesting and insightful description than the TC article.

(The TechCrunch article also misinterprets parts of the blog post.)

We have to use it too (lectures), I wasn't too concerned, bc this is just another web-app, isn't it... Well - it is (judging from the exe-tar which mainly include a QT-webview...), but like in 2003 they expect you to download and execute random crap unsandboxed. Wheew...

Me too. I swear they are stretching "vulnerability" to the point of stupidity. So, if a Hacker gets into your Zoom Meeting (itself a problem) and sends you a link, and you click it, bad things happen? Why, send out the hounds to any thing that has clickable links. Better boycot web browsers too while we're at it. Because the problem here isn't a clickable link, what if someone copy pastes it? Is that a zoom vulnerability too? The issue is Microsoft allowing SMB to the internet by default, or bad IT config allowing it to the net by default. The password problem is Microsoft STILL using insecure auth mechanisms there. NONE OF THIS has ANYTHING to do with Zoom or e-mail or a web browser IMO.

Oh, if you're already hacked in enough to run code on MacOS, you can grab the camera with Zoom. Or, you know, use any of many methods to do that I'm sure. The problem, and the reason for HIPS / AV / security solutions is to stop running "hacker code". If I'm running arbitrary code on your Mac, I don't need Zoom to grab a password.

Now, the bad installer methods used on MacOS - yes, those should not happen and ought to be fixed. I think it's the big problem, no one gets paid for a secure system, but one that people can use. Security just causes issues sadly, and making it possible for the most incapable computer user is why everyone loves Zoom for "just working". That sadly incentivizes them to try and work around security roadblocks, which is bad.

Makes you wonder what was Apple thinking when they designed this security feature? Any app can spoof a system-looking dialog and ask for the password. Not sure about about a better way tho.

It’s not a spoofed dialog, it’s the app asking the system (using a rather dangerous API) to ask you to grant access. It’s a legit system prompt. The app doesn’t see your password. It’s like sudo rm doesn’t give your password to rm. Can we stop the misinformation?

Sadly it's too late for me to edit or delete my post. Thank you for clarifying.

Is this contrived? The security risk may be overstated in the headline, but it definitely seems like a problem.

Regarding the hatred for Zoom... I'm sure a lot of people feel the same as me. I'm tired of having to install and trust yet another native app just to perform a task I've been able to easily do with countless other solutions for well over a decade. I understand why Zoom in particular has found recent success, but it's still annoying.

Zoom's recent surge in popularity also probably draws a lot of attention from cynics and skeptics.

It's especially relevant to me and my family; as the room-moms in my children's classrooms want to use Zoom to set up playdates so the kids from the classroom can interact, since they really miss each other (and don't get to see each other otherwise).

None of this is contrived; and all of it is serious when you're the parent of a school age child.

And you're worried that your child will use this exploit to gain root access to your system?

Shitting on people pointing out concerns with/exploits in zoom appears to be this week's low latency path to more upvotes no matter how serious the claim is.

Every zoom post I've read here has at least one highly-upvoted comment about "hey everyone lay off zoom". Why? Why should we give a company that millions are now using for the first time a break? Why should we ignore issues with software that tons of people are now using and potentially opening themselves up to danger?

I use zoom, I used to before the pandemic and I've used it with friends since multiple times. I'm not some anti-zoom, burn it all down type. That said I think issues with it warrant a discussion and there is a reason these things are upvoted: because millions of people are now using it and are unaware of the risk they are taking.

I wonder if many even read the article. I wouldn't shit on the fact that there are vulnerabilities but if I score these . However, telling people "if you care about your security and privacy, perhaps stop using Zoom” is a wee bit hyperbolic. When I score these using CVSS 3 I come up with a Medium vulnerability. Here's the vector string for the first vuln that I scored 6.5- CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N

My first experience with Zoom was the installer opening, telling me it was going to perform a pre-install check to see if the software could be installed, then immediately closing without explanation. It turns out it installed everything immediately without even telling me. This immediately set off alarm bells and made it feel like it was malware.

It's actually using this deceptive phrasing to install (literally, copy) all its files directly into /Applications instead of going through the standard Mac OS install flow.

I'm typically very out of the loop on things but is there any particular reason HN seems to be hell bent on shitting on Zoom this week. Don't recall seeing this much vitriol for a particular product in a while.

With more and more of the world, and especially Silicon Valley, being locked-down and quarantined, video conferencing is obviously going through the roof and Zoom seems to be winning. It's just getting a lot of attention, and any flaws are suddenly more impactful.

On the one hand, all the attention (if pride is removed from the equation) should be win-win since remote workers might end up less spied on or hacked and zoom still makes a huge profit.

if the best predictor of the future is past behavior then it doesn't look good.

But in answer to "why is HN shitting all over Zoom", I think the answer is "because they aren't doing good enough".

There's no malice there (on the posters' side). If Zoom does better people won't have cause for shining a flashlight on their data privacy policies or security holes. We will see if Zoom grows up fast, since the momentum towards them is already so large I don't see it changing prior to the Fall when schools might risk re-evaluating their tools.

Due to quarantine remote working, a lot of people are obliged to use Zoom. To some Zoom has a reputation of not taking security seriously, so they feel forced to compromise the security of their computers. Personally I think this reputation is justified.

You can access Zoom meetings through a pure web interface without installing anything. The experience is somewhat reduced.

And to get to the pure web interface you'll have to either know the magic URL or fight some more dark patterns, because they really want you to install their software.

Zoom has plenty to be shat on about, if anything I find most commenters on hn defending it (at least it "just works", etc).

Probably everyone got bored from constant Google bashing so it's time to do something else before going back.

I'm sure there are other reasons, but three understandable reasons I've seen:

1) The lack of e2e encryption despite trying to market themselves as having secure video chat.

2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22749805 (comment in this thread - they literally phish you)

3) https://twitter.com/c1truz_/status/1244737672930824193 abusing the traditional installation process on OSX

EDIT: OK (2) may be a real system prompt - https://twitter.com/DigitalResist0r/status/12452813782932807...? I didn't see anyone else in the twitter thread claim that it was using a real system dialog, so I'd still say it was poor practice of them to have such a shady looking system dialog.

Criticize him for irresponsible disclosure maybe, but is it wrong to say that an unpatched local privilege escalation is a zero day?

judging from their past behavior towards security researchers they have done nothing that deserves responsible disclosure. responsible disclosure starts with responsible QA by the vendor.

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