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ZOOMSDAY<br>How A Security Found a Nation-State Vulnerability in Zoom in One Day
Idan Levcovich<br>Senior Vulnerability Researcher
ZOOMSDAY<br>Overview<br>A critical vulnerability in Zoom, a platform used by 70% of the Fortune 100, discovered by publicly available frontier models, allows an attacker participating in a meeting a zero-click remote code execution on all meeting participants across all native clients. This research emphasizes the risk of weaponized AI and how vulnerable we are as an industry.
Executive Summary<br>Ⓐ Security, the Autonomous Offensive Security and Remediation Platform, discovered a critical flaw in Zoom that let an attacker take complete control of another user's device during a live call. No click, no download, and nothing required of the victim but being in the meeting. The vulnerability is present in every version of Zoom on every device and operating system: Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android and Linux. The vulnerability exists in all versions up to and including 7.0.5.<br>All Zoom Workplace clients on all supported platforms before version 7.1.5 and 7.0.6 using end-to-end encryption settings are still vulnerable. We recommend updating your clients to the latest version.<br>The entire operation, from finding the flaw to building a working exploit, was carried out by Ⓐ using fewer than 20 prompts on publicly available AI models in under 24 hours.<br>This class of capability would previously have only been available to nation-state threat actors, but the model requiring elite teams, months of effort, and weapons-grade budgets has collapsed. Today, a single researcher was able to develop a nation-state-level exploit in less than a day.<br>The vulnerability is a memory-corruption bug that exploits Zoom's annotation feature.<br>Zoom annotation is built on a proprietary protocol — closed code with no public documentation or specification. Ⓐ Research was able to exploit the fact that every Zoom client automatically parses whatever it receives, sending a specially crafted message to corrupt the receiving client's memory and run code on it. The protocol opens a direct channel between a viewer and a sharer, letting the attacker target each participant individually.<br>The exploit enables attackers to either join or host a meeting, target any participant, and take over their machine with no required action from the victim and no visual cue indicating the compromise.<br>Once the nefarious code is running on the victim's device, the threat actor can quietly steal personal data, switch on the microphone or camera to spy on the target, or install other malicious software. In a large call, that's a room full of targets from a single message, with no safe seat in it.<br>Ⓐ Security collaborated with Zoom to address the issue. The company reported the vulnerability to Zoom in June 2026. Zoom acknowledged receipt and deployed client-side and server-side fixes.<br>The vulnerabilities are tracked as CVE-2026-53413, CVE-2026-53414, and CVE-2026-53415 with critical 9.0 CVSS:4.0 scores. Zoom has issued a security alert.
Intro<br>Ⓐ found a critical, nation-state-grade vulnerability in Zoom in a single working day using an AI agent and models anyone can access today.<br>Exploits like this one are weapons. Governments regulate their export. Criminal organizations pay millions for them. Acquiring one has always required nation-state infrastructure, elite teams, and months of work.<br>That barrier is gone.<br>AI security research has been building to this in steps: first solving CTF challenges, then finding bugs in public bug-bounty programs. That work was impressive, but it lived in controlled or open environments, targets with published scope and known rules. Zoom is neither. It's closed-source enterprise software with no public internals, the kind of target that defenders assume is protected by obscurity and scrutiny. Producing a working exploit here sits in the category nation-states spend months and millions to reach.<br>The flaw allowed an attacker to take control of a device during any live Zoom call, with no action required from the victim, no click, no download. It worked in both directions: a compromised presenter could reach every participant, and any participant could reach the presenter. It was confirmed on all platforms Zoom runs on: Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.<br>This matters beyond Zoom. Zoom is a core infrastructure for 70% of the Fortune 100, most of the Fortune 500, and federal agencies. Additionally, it is the platform where millions meet their doctors, lawyers, and families. But the real finding isn't the bug. It's the speed. The barrier to producing this class of weapon has collapsed, and it won't come back.<br>We disclosed the vulnerability to Zoom privately; their team engaged quickly and shipped a fix before publication.<br>The takeaway for security leaders: defenses built for a world where these weapons were scarce no...