Rewterz Threat Alert – New Zero Days in Zoom Allow Session Hijack

Severity

High

Description

The popular web conferencing platform Zoom has two zero-day vulnerabilities that could give local, unprivileged attackers root privileges, and allow them to access victims’ microphone and camera.

Analysis Summary

Two zero days have been uncovered for the popular web conferencing platform could give local, unprivileged attackers root privileges, and allow them to access victims’ microphone and camera.

Flaw # 1

The first flaw stems from an issue with Zoom’s installer and allows unprivileged attackers to gain root privileges. The issue stems from the Zoom installer using the AuthorizationExecuteWithPrivileges application programming interface (API) function, which is used to install the Zoom MacOS app (leveraging preinstallation scripts) without any user interaction.

Flaw # 2

The second zero day flaw gives attackers Zoom’s mic and camera access, allowing for a way to record Zoom meetings, or snoop in on victims’ personal lives.

Recent versions of macOS require explicit user approval for these permissions, Zoom has an “exception” that allows code to be injected by third party libraries. Researcher said a malicious third party library could be loaded into Zoom’s process/address space – automatically inheriting all Zooms access rights, and ultimately giving attackers control over these camera and microphone permissions.

“Due to an ‘exception’ entitlement, we showed how to inject a malicious library into Zoom’s trusted process context,” Wardle said. “This affords malware the ability to record all Zoom meetings, or, simply spawn Zoom in the background to access the mic and webcam at arbitrary times.”

Impact

• Gain access to the victim’s system
• Exposure of sensitive data and information
• Session takeover

Affected Vendors

Zoom

Affected Products

MacOS

Remediation

Update to the latest version of Zoom.