It may seem surprising, but today tThere are still many people using Zoom in Windows 7. And to some extent it makes sense, since for many people Windows 7 is still, along with Windows XP, the best version of Microsoft’s operating system. And this, of course, occasions that there is still a large community of 7 users, despite the fact that Microsoft terminated technical support for this version of its desktop operating system earlier this year.
The problem, the real problem, is that in quite a few of those cases (I don’t mean all of them, obviously) the lack of support and therefore of updates is not interpreted as a problem. Or, at best, it is seen as a lesser and assumable evil. A point of view in which security is not taken into account and which, without any doubt, will translate sooner or later in having to assume the consequences of such tremendous laxity when assessing the importance of protecting against all kinds of threats. And yes, using Zoom in Windows 7 without protecting yourself is a clear example of this.
A few days ago, the security company 0patch received information about a security issue affecting the latest version of the Zoom client for Windows. With this information, they carried out various analyzes, determining that the threat was real, that there was no evidence of it until then (so it was a zero-day vulnerability) and that it allowed arbitrary remote code execution. For this, only two conditions had to be met: that the victim open a supposedly clean file, and that I was using the Zoom client in Windows 7 or some previous version of Windows.
After carrying out these checks, 0patch contacted those responsible for Zoom to inform them of the problem, and also created a security patch so that people using Zoom in Windows 7 can protect yourself from such a threat. At the moment the patch is free, until Zoom fixes the problem, or communicates that it has no intention of doing so. For now, for security reasons, the technical details of the vulnerability have not been made public, although cybercriminals are already aware of its existence.
In this case, fortunately, it has been a security company that has detected and patched the problem, so that users can continue to use Zoom in Windows 7. However, this is not always the case and, as in many other contexts, security problems are caused by a sum of factors. In this case, surely, the problem of the Zoom client itself is combined with the lack of security updates to Windows 7, given that in later versions, which are still being updated, the security hole in Zoon is not enough to lead to carry out the attack.
Today is Zoom in Windows 7, but tomorrow it can be any other of the millions of combinations that can occur. Thus, unless it is for very specific needs, the most recommended is to make the jump from Windows 7 to Windows 10, although with May Update they have not been shown off. Having a safe and updated operating system is becoming more necessary every day.
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