Security Concerns with Zoom and SAP

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Security Concerns with Zoom and SAP

This is a companion piece to our other post on TikTok and potential security concerns with SAP. The geopolitical background issues are the same. China has a history of corporate and other espionage and a history of inserting its interests into the affairs of corporate entities, even technically private ones, at home. It is also the world’s most developed surveillance state, and recently, it and the United States have been increasingly at odds on a variety of issues.

Unlike TikTok, Zoom is not headquartered in China. Its owner, Eric Yuan is originally from China, but moved to the United States in 1997.

The Rise of Zoom

As most people now know, Zoom has been one of the greatest beneficiaries of CoVid lockdowns, seeing an almost twentyfold rise in usage over the past year. People isolating to slow the spread of ‘the virus’ have flocked to the platform for social and work purposes. The subsequent discovery by many workers (and some businesses) that much of what they do doesn’t depend on their being on-site has contributed to its continued expansion. Lots of educational institutions and social services and primary medical services have adapted to employ video as well.

The ease with which Zoom can be accessed and its full but intuitive feature set have spurred its widespread adoption, but that same broad suite of functionalities and ease of access have made it a broad target for hackers and other online bad actors.

The Problematic History

There have been a series of security issues with Zoom that are, perhaps, not surprising given the nature of the platform. Early on, many people using the platform were declining to use the password option, which gave an opening to bombers and grifters to bust in to meetings and wreak havoc. In one infamous example, a major university’s graduation, held online because of CoVid, was interrupted with racial invectives. The platform has been used for information scraping, malware injection, password stealing, and just about anything else a hacker might want to do. At one point, Zoom partnered with a Chinese firm to generate cryptographic keys, which threw up warning signs among politicians and security experts. Additionally, Zoom agreed to de-platform several well-known Chinese dissidents at the request of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The list of exploits and possible vulnerabilities is very long, and you can read about them in depth in this excellent compilation at Tom’s Guide. The most problematic thing about Zoom, though, has been its lack of candor at times, for instance claiming to have inaugurated end-to-end encryption when it hadn’t done so. In response to various criticisms, Zoom has taken steps to mitigate its vulnerabilities, but very few of these steps seem, from an outside perspective, to have been taken proactively. A variety of alternatives to Zoom are available. If you share sensitive information on such a platform, you might be better off to look elsewhere until Zoom has established a more robust security track record, and this is probably more likely to be true of businesses that employ SAP services than those that do not. Zoom’s vulnerabilities make it not just problematic in view of the Chinese, but also corporate espionage, sabotage, and sundry black-hat exploits. As with TikTok, your vulnerability profile will depend entirely on the potential value of the information that you share to those who shouldn’t have it.

TikTok Security Concerns and SAP

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TikTok Security Concerns and SAP

Geo-Political Background

Recently, the Trump administration has kicked around the possibility of banning the use of TikTok in the United States. This comes against a backdrop of increasing tensions between the United States and China due to China’s emergence as a military and economic rival superpower, and exacerbated by what some in the West view as China’s military and economic expansionism against a backdrop of long-time institutional infiltration, technological and other espionage, and unfair trade practices. Recently, relations have been further strained by internal Chinese crackdowns on civil dissent, reneging on the conditions of its treaty with Great Britain regarding the status of Hong Kong, and what some (though not all) view as blame for not having blown the whistle earlier about CoVid-19, which has had devastating health, social, and economic consequences around the globe.

India, which has recently clashed with China above the disputed Galwan Valley between China and Indian-administered Kashmir, has banned the popular short-form video plus sound application. There have been rumors, though denied, that Australia and the Philippines might also follow suit. Both of those nations have been alarmed by Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea.

Does TikTok Pose a Danger?

Does the application pose a danger? It’s hard to say. Like most such applications, new versions often are filled with security issues that need to be patched, and TikTok does a comparatively decent job of doing so. The company that owns TiKTok, ByteDance, is headquartered in China, but not ‘owned’ by the government per se. ByteDance swears up and down that it would never convey any user information to the Chinese government, but the rights and responsibilities of ‘private’ corporations in China vis-a-vis the government are more . . . negotiable, let us say, there than they are in the West.

At present, there’s no reason to believe that TikTok collects any more information than other ‘free’ social media applications, such as Facebook and Twitter, which monetize metadata from their users to target ads and such, but following revelations of what Cambridge Analytica was able to infer from access to Facebook’s information during the 2016 election, there is some concern about how China might use such information for similar purposes (or worse) such as: wargaming, propaganda/disinformation and election meddling. We have already seen that they take a very aggressive line against their own citizens at home and abroad who use online platforms to criticize the government, and like the Russians they seem to be cultivating their own troll farms.

With Regard to SAP Users . . .

The problem here is that many SAP users are companies whose information is not only valuable to themselves, but potentially also to others. One of the things that TikTok was criticized for was maintaining access to clipboard information. They were criticized, when found not to have fixed the problem. They excused the delay by saying that there was a conflict with the spam filter. Theoretically, a government with access to such information might leverage it either through simple data mining or blackmail. A surveillance state such as China might exploit or introduce backdoor methods of accessing data on devices with the TikTok application, as they are said to have done with Huawei, their 5G cellphone network.

So there is no clear-cut answer on whether to prevent employees from using TikTok on devices that also might be used for work purposes. As a precaution, and partly because of the conflict, India has banned certain Chinese apps (including TikTok). The State Department would like Microsoft or some other US-based company to buy it. They have given a deadline before it is banned. For the moment, we advise caution.