San Francisco, Aug 13 : A security researcher has discovered an opportunity for attackers to could use Zoom, the macOS version of Zoom to gain access to the entire operating system.According to The Verge, details of the vulnerability were made public in the presentation of Mac security expert Patrick Wardle at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas this week.
Zoom has fixed a number of the bugs but the researcher disclosed a vulnerability that was not patched that continues to affect systems today.
The exploit is able to target the application installer of the Zoom application, which has to be run with special permissions granted to users to enable or disable the primary Zoom application from the computer.
Although the installer requires users to enter their password at the time of first adding the application onto the system Wardle discovered that the auto-update feature was running in the background with superuser access.
When Zoom issued an update the updater would download the latest package after verifying that it was digitally signed by Zoom.
However, a glitch in the way that the method of checking was implemented led to allowing to the updater any program with similar name to Zoom’s signature certificate would be sufficient to pass the testtherefore, an attacker could replace any malware and make it executed by the updater with elevated privileges, the report stated.
This results in a privilege escalation security that assumes that an attacker already has gained access to the system, and then uses an exploit to gain greater degree of access.
In this scenario the attacker starts with an account for a restricted user but progresses to the most powerful type of user known as”superuser” or “superuser” or “root” -and is able to access, delete or alter any file on the system.
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