Zoom Security Flaw found with Mac Cameras..
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Serious Zoom security flaw could let websites hijack Mac cameras
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Serious Zoom security flaw could let websites hijack Mac cameras
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- Thread starter Poke
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No, a Zoom Security Flaw has been found. The Mac just happens to be the platform this malware (er, excuse me, finely-crafted AV Conferencing software) runs on. The Mac Camera has nothing to do with it, other than being a part of the MacBook or iMac that might have Zoom installed.
Thanks for the link, but now I have revalidated the The Verge technique of finely-crafted headlines that encourage clicks which feeds their ad revenue. Zoom is not the name of the exploit, merely the name of the plug-in or software package that has the exploitable code. Mentioning "Mac Camera" in the headline guarantees traffic. The responsible headline would be "Security Flaw found with Zoom AV Conferencing Software", but only 10% of the people would click on the link.
Actually, Poke, you provided the Click-bait, so full disclosure: Are you employed by The Verge or any of its associated companies?
Thanks for the link, but now I have revalidated the The Verge technique of finely-crafted headlines that encourage clicks which feeds their ad revenue. Zoom is not the name of the exploit, merely the name of the plug-in or software package that has the exploitable code. Mentioning "Mac Camera" in the headline guarantees traffic. The responsible headline would be "Security Flaw found with Zoom AV Conferencing Software", but only 10% of the people would click on the link.
Actually, Poke, you provided the Click-bait, so full disclosure: Are you employed by The Verge or any of its associated companies?
First it's Not click bait its just general information dealing with things related to Apple Second No I'm not a employee with the Verge or any companies that I post links to their sites. Most of the sites are just sites that are reporting news about the specific issue whatever it may be which just provides sources on dealing with the issue this way its just not hear say. As far as ads go I'm never a fan of them no matter the site so its not up to me who chooses to put them on their site rather it be here or any other place. So from now on I will make sure not to post links anymore..
Sorry I misdirected my ire at you, Poke. Obviously this site is first and foremost a Satellite site, and these side forums are for those of us who enjoy sharing information we have come across while perusing the Web. I notice that some of these sites have used techniques that are not concerned about sharing information, but producing a headline that uses terms that will guarantee more traffic to the site’s webpages.
You were missing from this site for a period of time and I wondered what had happened to you. Don’t stop helping us out just because I was upset at The Verge’s take on something. I think the coverage of this Zoom exploit became more focused once people were aware of it and provided better information. If you have a Mac and never installed Zoom or have a home security system that doesn’t use the Zoom video streaming technology you aren’t affected by this issue.
Here’s a link to the Security Researcher who first made Zoom aware of this issue three months ago:
It includes a way to check if you’re affected and how to remove the local web server that Zoom installs to bypass Apple’s security measures in Safari.
You were missing from this site for a period of time and I wondered what had happened to you. Don’t stop helping us out just because I was upset at The Verge’s take on something. I think the coverage of this Zoom exploit became more focused once people were aware of it and provided better information. If you have a Mac and never installed Zoom or have a home security system that doesn’t use the Zoom video streaming technology you aren’t affected by this issue.
Here’s a link to the Security Researcher who first made Zoom aware of this issue three months ago:
It includes a way to check if you’re affected and how to remove the local web server that Zoom installs to bypass Apple’s security measures in Safari.
The past few days I got called in to work on my wife's iMAC. She was complaining it was running really slow lately. Long story short, It seems that after 8 years of daily use, her hard drive is going bad. It has plenty of space but accessing files takes minutes, not seconds. I've done several diagnostics and this seems to be the case. It took me 3 days now to back up her data files and a PST Outlook file with copy and paste to an external USB drive. I saved all her Excel spreadsheets and word docx. Only recommendation Apple tech had was to not use the backup image because it mat be corrupted. Anyway, the bottom line is her 8 year old iMac is being replaced by a newer one with more ram and faster processor. I asked her how long has her iMAC been this slow. She said since Wednesday! So whatever happened happened from one day to the next.
She doesn't use the camera or siri so for security sake, I put a piece of gaffer's tape over the camera. Low tech guaranteed solution. I saw the Zoom file on her drive but didn't know what that was.
The iMAC has been so trouble free over the years I really never had to learn much about MAC OS. Maybe I need to go back to grad school at YTU and get my MS in MacOS.
She doesn't use the camera or siri so for security sake, I put a piece of gaffer's tape over the camera. Low tech guaranteed solution. I saw the Zoom file on her drive but didn't know what that was.
The iMAC has been so trouble free over the years I really never had to learn much about MAC OS. Maybe I need to go back to grad school at YTU and get my MS in MacOS.
MacOS changes enough from one to the next that a degree in one version may not be worth much two or three years out -- especially as Apple tapers off the Mac part of the business.
Its been long enough that we need another automotive analogy:
Getting a degree in MacOS may be like getting a degree in American sedans: at some point in the next few years, they'll all be foreign brands (and more likely to be built in America).
You took it too seriously. YTU is a reference to You Tube University. That means I know what I know because I attend classes on You Tube.
I have the WD Network drive working on all but the new win 10 OS. It likes to receive downloads from any of the other computers' uploads from any of the folders, but it won't upload any of it's files to the drive yet. I can browse the computer's drives that are shared from any computer and select a file to upload but it fails to upload.
As you hinted earlier, w10 has a number of settings that do the same thing to get the drives and folders to be seen on the Lan. The last one I discovered was windows defender also has to be set to share drives and folders, so just setting each in properties wasn't good enough.
So while the computers now can work through the WD network drive, none of the win 10 computers can be seen yet in the File Explorer under the network. Only the media content shows up now with all the share features.
I have the WD Network drive working on all but the new win 10 OS. It likes to receive downloads from any of the other computers' uploads from any of the folders, but it won't upload any of it's files to the drive yet. I can browse the computer's drives that are shared from any computer and select a file to upload but it fails to upload.
As you hinted earlier, w10 has a number of settings that do the same thing to get the drives and folders to be seen on the Lan. The last one I discovered was windows defender also has to be set to share drives and folders, so just setting each in properties wasn't good enough.
So while the computers now can work through the WD network drive, none of the win 10 computers can be seen yet in the File Explorer under the network. Only the media content shows up now with all the share features.
Don, if the old iMac is still viable and you pick up a new Mac Mini or iMac, you can start up the old iMac in Target Disk Mode and use a Thunderbolt cable to interconnect the two Macs. When setting up macOS on the new machine, you are given the option to pull data and programs from the old Mac. I've used this a number of times when upgrading. You can also restore from a Time Machine backup disk or use an Ethernet connection if you don't have the Thunderbolt available on the old iMac (and if that's the case, probably no reason to go down the Apple Dongle rathole with a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter, and then from Thunderbolt 2 to Firewire in order to talk to the old Mac). It will also use a .IMG file on an external source like a NAS.
macOS tries to make it really easy to upgrade your Mac (obviously, it means more money for Apple when you do) so you should be able to get your wife back in business relatively quickly and painlessly.
macOS tries to make it really easy to upgrade your Mac (obviously, it means more money for Apple when you do) so you should be able to get your wife back in business relatively quickly and painlessly.
File sharing under Windows has always been one of the most dangerous things you can subject yourself to. Microsoft knows this better than anyone after having to patch three of the most pernicious trojans ever that traveled between machines that had sharing enabled. The whole idea of network storage is so that the storage device isn't running an OS that has its pants down by design.
In time for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum has put out an AR App that lets you follow along in "realtime" (50 years after the fact). Right "now" Apollo 11 is 131,500 miles from Earth on its way to the Lunar Orbit Insertion burn.
The timeline allows you to scrub back along the mission milestones to launch, staging, Trans-Lunar Insertion Burn, and extracting the LEM from the S-IVB stage. The AR aspect allows you to examine the spacecraft from all angles. There is also a pre-launch view of the Saturn V on the launchpad 15 seconds before liftoff, which you can then precede to launch and follow upward with your phone.
The timeline allows you to scrub back along the mission milestones to launch, staging, Trans-Lunar Insertion Burn, and extracting the LEM from the S-IVB stage. The AR aspect allows you to examine the spacecraft from all angles. There is also a pre-launch view of the Saturn V on the launchpad 15 seconds before liftoff, which you can then precede to launch and follow upward with your phone.
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And here I thought fast roping into a jungle of enemy machine gun fire was the most dangerous thing I ever did.
Anyway, got the new iMac in today from China. Set it up in minutes, and got Office 365 installed for my wife and recovered all her exel spreadsheets she was worried about. Just in time too because this afternoon the hard drive in it finally died. The screen just lights up gray now and then shuts down. I'm going to fix it but thats another day.
The new iMac is really nice. It sees the win 10 computers but I can't access the shared hard drives. Says access denied. But thanks to your suggestion the NAS drive now has a collection of folders of common files I uploaded, so a bit inconvenient but it works. I'm sure win10 must be able to work on a LAN with the right settings. I just don't know what I have wrong. I have a relative who lives locally who is a network engineer. I'm sure he could figure it out but the trick is getting him to the house to look at it. His employer is in California and he travels all over the country debugging and fixing network problems for small businesses.
Remember that network engineers are more about network hardware (routers, switches and firewalls) than computers. That said, one can't help picking up on some of the problems with the various operating systems along the way.
Rest easy in the knowledge that the problem probably isn't related to Microsoft's failed "Homegroup" initiative (unless you're still trying to use it). Homegroup was dismissed as of build 1803 as the default file sharing scheme. The vestigial explorer menu items are still in Windows 10 but they are non-functional stubs.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4091368/windows-10-homegroup-removed
I'm vexed by why you think using the NAS is onerous. In Windows, you can assign some or all of your "libraries" to network storage. I would expect that the Mac can change a mount point to a network drive (although Apple would perhaps give it an odd name and make it more convoluted than it should be).
It's just me needing to break old habits of saving out to a local hard drive. I told you each win 10 computer has 16TB of data storage. These are video projects that require a lot of large files. My NAS western Digital drive is just 2 TB Raid 1. But being a network drive the speed is quite slow compared to a local drive. However, I told you this WD 2TB NAS is an experiment to see how I like the new way of dealing with win 10 file sharing limits. If it works out I may research a much larger NAS and pull the 8 4TB drives from the machines and use them. For speed, I still have the local M.2 sticks (2TB) capacity I can render to and then store to the NAS when the project is complete.
I do wish someone could explain to me why Microsoft allows all these share settings if they, at the same time, make file sharing invisible to others. Maybe the new way is only for photos and videos because that does work. That's kind of like the way Apple works in the icloud. Only for pictures and videos.
BTW- I had some good news today- After spending hours reading up on how the Mac OS works and how they did the architecture in the iMAC I learned that Apple has a way to recover a dead on power on from the BIOS. The first thing to do is to hold the power button down for 30 seconds. Then push the power button + COMMAND + R keys and this activates a recovery screen where you can erase the hard drive and restore the Mac OS from a backup copy. My only problem is my oldest iMAC backup was after we discovered we had this slow down problem. So I have restored the old iMAC to a crippled state. I also understand that Apple makes a clean OS available on the internet but this will wipe all old data files which I now have saved as a data file set and installed on the new iMAC. The new iMAC is a significant upgrade from 4 core to 6 core and 8 to 16GB, and 2.7Ghz to 3.6Ghz. This old one will become mine which I may give to the grandkids.
So the next step is to set up the old iMAC with a clean OS to recover the speed it had a month ago if I can locate a source for the clean MacOS High Sierra.I don't expect that you would want to share video projects with others on the network. Then again, since you depend on multiple tools that run on different Windows versions, it would be nice.
My own LAN includes a NAS for the shared stuff (read/write access) and a 24TB Linux box for media but I'm not actively performing operations on the media files.
When you have a hard drive tragedy, the first thing to do is make a backup image or just take the drive out so you don't do any more damage. In cases like yours, I'd remove the drive and stick in a new one and start from scratch. Once the new drive is set up, then you can try doing a recovery on the old drive (connected via a USB adapter). I'm not sure how this works with Apple's file systems but I'm pretty sure there are software tools for salvaging from EaseUS and others.
My own LAN includes a NAS for the shared stuff (read/write access) and a 24TB Linux box for media but I'm not actively performing operations on the media files.
When you have a hard drive tragedy, the first thing to do is make a backup image or just take the drive out so you don't do any more damage. In cases like yours, I'd remove the drive and stick in a new one and start from scratch. Once the new drive is set up, then you can try doing a recovery on the old drive (connected via a USB adapter). I'm not sure how this works with Apple's file systems but I'm pretty sure there are software tools for salvaging from EaseUS and others.
My video editing work station does have 2 high performance computers but both are capable of running the same software. The old win7 has more older editing stuff that I rarely use these days. My workflow often has me doing a rendering on one machine and saving the rendered file to the other machine's fast m.2 storage in the project file. This allows for true background rendering while I work the project and not be throttled by a background rendering. This wouldn't be important for older HD projects but for 6K video h265 or Prores HQ rendering that produces a 180GB file per hour program, the NAS transfer time could really increase to hours too.
The Apple iMAC is coming along fine. My restore did have some problems with slow access to booting up Excel and Word. But I discovered that this older iMAC is the earliest model that will run Mojave. That is available for download for free and it is a 2 hour install right now. Once it is fully replacing my corrupted restore, I will do a clean backup of this before loading any office 365 or other apps. Apple does have good tools such as disk defrager, but these are under the weird names just to confuse everyone. For example, I had to learn that "Time Machine" is what they call backup / Restore. Since doing a restore takes so long over the internet, I will had a USB 1TB hard drive to the new iMAC so this shouldn't happen again. The "Time Machine" does a good job of scheduling backups with compressed data.
The Apple iMAC is coming along fine. My restore did have some problems with slow access to booting up Excel and Word. But I discovered that this older iMAC is the earliest model that will run Mojave. That is available for download for free and it is a 2 hour install right now. Once it is fully replacing my corrupted restore, I will do a clean backup of this before loading any office 365 or other apps. Apple does have good tools such as disk defrager, but these are under the weird names just to confuse everyone. For example, I had to learn that "Time Machine" is what they call backup / Restore. Since doing a restore takes so long over the internet, I will had a USB 1TB hard drive to the new iMAC so this shouldn't happen again. The "Time Machine" does a good job of scheduling backups with compressed data.
With the old iMAC now up and running and on Mojave OS, It is interesting comparing the speed of the two iMac's. The new one is noticeably faster once it boots up, but very close on boot up. Sure am glad the hard drive itself wasn't the problem.
Isn't the hard drive one of the few easily replaceable parts?
I think I'd rather run across a bad drive than a system with a demonstrated capacity to soil itself.
Actually with an iMAC anything under the cover is difficult to service since the entire case is glued together, same as the ipad. Once you melt the glue with a heat gun and use suction cups to pull the screen off the base without cracking it, removing the hard drive or upgrading RAM is like any other computer.
I think running for 7 years with zero maintenance is pretty good. I really don't know what the root cause of the failure was but the fix was pretty easy once I learned the process. Holding down the right keys on the keyboard when hitting the power button was the clue to step by step instructions to complete recovery. The only thing I can think of is she left the grandson load a bunch of games on it, probably from some suspicious source. They are all gone now.
Both iMAC's backed up their internal hard drives now to the NAS. I was a little concerned that it would keep the two separate but it created a folder for each machine and named the folder by the computer names I assigned. There wasn't clear info on how that would work from WD support. Several on the forums for this NAS said you have to manually partition the NAS drives because only one Time Machine folder is allowed. But inside that Time Machine, were now two folders that clearly kept the backups separate. Pretty slick! I like when things work out well.
Another slick feature I have on my new iMAC. This has to do with the Apple infrastructure. The new iMAC with Mojave OS allows you to identify the login with your Apple Watch 4. This is supposed to make the system more secure as it is mated to the Apple watch. So now when I have my watch on, I can go near the iMAC and it just comes on by itself, ready to go to work.
Apple has fixed security flaws in iOS 14 that may have already been actively exploited -- update your devices ASAP.
www.engadget.com
iOS 14.4 rolls out with Bluetooth audio monitoring
Apple has fixed security flaws in iOS 14 that may have already been actively exploited -- update your devices ASAP.
www.engadget.com
