[nayuki]

Zscaler was deployed on a Windows 11 machine at a place that a friend worked at. When I assessed the software, its behavior was downright evil like malware. As we all know, it injects its own root certificate into the operating system in order to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks on TLS/HTTPS connections to monitor the user's web activity.

Furthermore, it locks down the web browser's settings so that you cannot use a proxy server to bypass Zscaler's MITM. I saw this behavior in Mozilla Firefox, where the proxy option is set to "No proxy" and all other options are disabled and grayed out; I imagine that it does the same to Google Chrome. If you try to modify the browser's .ini(?) file for proxy settings, Zscaler immediately overwrites it against your will. Zscaler worked very hard to enforce its settings in order to spy on the computer user.

And as you'd expect, if you open up the Zscaler GUI in the system tray, you are presented with the option to disable the software if you have the IT password. Which of course, you don't have. Then again, that might be an epsilon better than the Cybereason antivirus software, which just has a system tray icon with no exit option, and cannot be killed in Task Manager even if you are a local administrator, and imposes a heavy slowdown if you're open hundreds of small text files per second.