WebinarTV hosts 200,000 “webinars.” A Zoom call you may thought was private might be one of them.

One of the more fucked up business models I’ve seen.

If you search for support groups, you’ll see thousands of people being outed in anonymous recovery meeting, grief groups, etc. Disgusting.

I hope these guys get sued to hell.

  • LiveLM@lemmy.zipEnglish
    21·
    12 hours ago

    “CyberAlberta’s investigation found that WebinarTV primarily gains initial access to Zoom webinars via third-party browser extensions. These extensions can access webinar links when a user either inadvertently grants calendar permissions—exposing meeting invitations—or willfully submits meeting details into the WebinarTV platform,” the report said. “WebinarTV is believed to leverage a range of browser extensions that provide functionalities such as AI powered transcription and note-taking tools, or tools to automate the joining of online meetings.

    Remember folks, be skeptical of every single extension you add to your browser. Try to install only the absolutely necessary and if possible, only FOSS extensions.
    This model of offering simple functionality together with malware is so widespread, you wouldn’t believe.

    • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      2·
      9 hours ago

      In olden days of W2K I would just assume malware is everywhere, and while trying to be as clean as possible, I always have some malware and shouldn’t do anything personal with computers that I can’t accept being possibly compromised.

      I was a kid, too.

      Then that idea that you can be safe has gotten to me, both through switching to Linux and through stupidity.

      OK, a bit before that porn and historical military music became too interesting.

      So. Malware is everywhere. Some guy from India’s malware is in a browser extension and a Google Play v2ray client, some guy from China’s malware is in an ebook reader, and some government’s malware is in the operating system you use, and some government’s deep state’s malware is in algorithms and protocols, as a backdoor hidden in the open.

      Perhaps the Internet is one big compute cluster operated via such, providing free computation for US deep state, who the hell knows.

      But even without conspiracy theories - IRL crooks hide traps in far simpler things.

      The whole trust that most of what you use doesn’t have backdoors stealing everything possible, that trust is reminiscent of Soviet people literate in the first generation, who blindly trusted everything printed in a typography. Well, the generation having such has naturally left us. I think that will also happen for attitude to working with computers in some 60 years or so.