Zoombombing: How it works and how to prevent it from happening to you

Introduction

COVID-19 is likely to be the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year for 2020. But as well as entering our lexicon across the world, it has also changed us at a cultural level. One aspect of this is in how we communicate at work.

Online collaboration platforms were already seeing a hiatus before the coronavirus swept the planet. Now, platforms that handle video conferencing are experiencing a renaissance. 

One such platform is Zoom. This video conferencing platform is less than 10 years old but is seeing record numbers of users since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. The daily active users (DAU) of Zoom had increased from 10 million to 200 million in the three months leading up to March 2020. In a letter to users, Zoom’s founder Eric Yuan said: “… as of the end of December last year, the maximum number of daily meeting participants, both free and paid, conducted on Zoom was approximately 10 million. In March this year, we reached more than 200 million daily meeting participants …”

Zoom is used by many of those 200 million participants for business purposes. In doing so, sensitive and proprietary information is shared. But a phenomenon known as Zoombombing is threatening the safe use of Zoom for work.

With this in mind, I’ll take a look at the security aspects of using Zoom in a business context and the current options available on the platform to improve safety.

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Zoombombing: Why it’s more than just annoying

In late March, the FBI put out a warning that video conferencing platforms were being hijacked, saying: “FBI has received multiple reports of conferences being disrupted by pornographic and/or hate images and threatening language.”

A recent Zoom meeting by digital identity industry group Women in Identity (Read more...)