The IT Nerd

I haven’t given TeamViewer much of a thought since this incident when it looked like the popular remote access and screen sharing software got hacked. But that changed last week when I got a call from a new client who was unable to get one feature of TeamViewer working. Specifically the screen blanking feature. This person’s use case was to use TeamViewer as a remote access tool and he wanted to blank the screen on the remote PC so that his activities could not be seen in his office. That should be easy enough to do as TeamViewer does have a screen blanking feature that is described in this support document. However, when he tried to do this, the video driver that was related to this feature would not install. So he called me for assistance.

I took a look at the problem and I quickly figured out what was going on. This customer was using Windows 10 and there was a feature that was turned on by default called device driver signing which verifies the integrity of driver packages and to verifies the identity of the software publisher who provides the driver packages. This feature requires the drivers use a digital signature and it’s meant to ensure that rogue drivers don’t make it onto your system and in turn cause havoc.

But in this case the digital signature was out of date:

If you look at the “Valid from” field, you’ll see that it is valid to 3/3/2018. That’s a total #fail as when I examined the rest of the driver package, they had signatures that were valid until 2020. So this is pretty sloppy work on the part of TeamViewer. And the only way around this is to disable Windows 10’s ability to check for signed drivers. You’ll note that I have not included instructions for doing so because disabling this feature is a pretty stupid idea that I will not support as it makes your PC somewhat less secure. Given that we live in a world where security threats are everywhere, dumbing down the security of your PC just to install something is not a good idea. After informing my client of this, he was seriously unimpressed and he’s looking for other options for remote access.

What’s even worse is that this is not a new situation. A simple Google search shows that this is something that has been around since 2017 in some form or another. Which is a really bad reflection on TeamViewer as they market their product as a corporate solution. But given the above it clearly isn’t and you should avoid TeamViewer like the plague.

This entry was posted on April 29, 2019 at 10:12 am and is filed under Commentary with tags TeamViewer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.