How to completely remove the Zoom client from MacOS

This morning I read about a remote webcam execution vulnerability with Zoom. I don’t need to use Zoom day-to-day so opted for completely removing it from my machine.

Update: Apple has released a silent update for Mac users removing the vulnerable component in Zoom.

This article is a quick summary of what I checked to make sure Zoom was off my machine for good.

There are four things to do in order to remove Zoom from your Mac:

1. Uninstall the app. I use CleanMyMac to remove things I don’t want; it does an excellent job of cleaning up unused related files after an uninstall.
2. Checked that there were no Library files left. I looked in ~/Library/ and ~/Library/Preferences for anything that had “zoom” in the name.
3. Made sure the web server Zoom installs wasn’t running. I ran lsof -i :19421 if this came back with a PID I would kill it with kill -9 PROCESS_ID.
4. Removed the web server. rm -rf ~/.zoomus

What is Zoom

Zoom is video conferencing software, used by a lot of places because it has a pretty good free tier and typically handles spotty connections better than most.

Related links

• The article I originally read.