Professionals from all sectors are working from home to reach their business goals, despite the Coronovirus pandemic affecting nearly every country, city, and state in the world. Zoom, the video conferencing software has been a leader in helping businesses through this difficult time. Founded in San Jose, California, ‘Zoom’ has helped schools, entrepreneurs, and businesses maintain social distance and avoid business disruptions. “Zoom” allows students and business partners to meet online. They can do their school work and/or business work from their own homes. Teachers can teach their students, family members and friends can meet online and catch up, and employers can connect with their employees. Zoom’s basic version is free. It allows up to 100 participants and has a 40 minute limit per meeting. The paid version for large enterprises can host up to 500 participants.
Zoom Security
There is no way to know what could have gone wrong with so much happiness in a software program. Zoom was in the pre-Corona days, and things were getting worse.
July 2019,
Security researchers discovered that hackers could hack into Mac webcams using video conferencing software.
Zoom quickly fixed the flaws and sealed them.
Zoom was charged with leaking personal data to Facebook in March.
Eric Yuan, Zoom’s Chief Executive, stated in a blog post on March 27th that they had removed code from the Zoom iOS app, which was sending code to Facebook.
April 2020
Openly, thousands of personal videos of calls that included children and telehealth consultations were found online. You could record Zoom sessions and store them on your local machine or on the Zoom cloud. However, some of them ended up online causing a lot of controversy.
Additionally, the use of Zoom led to a new type security attack – “Zoombombing”. “Zoombombing” is when unauthorized miscreants enter a Zoom meeting to post lewd content. These security flaws were fixed and security updates were released to allay many security concerns.
Ban:
In the wake of numerous security incidents, Google and NASA, the German Foreign ministry, Australian Defense Force, and the United States Senate have all banned Zoom. The Cyber Coordination Centre (CyCord), Ministry of Home Affairs, India has declared that Zoom is not safe to use. Here are some security updates you can use if you have to use Zoom.
Security updates
Zoom gives the host of a Zoom meeting many functions. As Zoom grows and matures, here are the most recent security updates for hosts.
For every meeting, create a new ID/password. This ensures that no Zoombombers can gatecrash private conversations. Even if they have one meeting ID and password, they can’t enter any subsequent ones.
After all participants have entered, lock the meeting. This will ensure that no one else can enter the meeting and Zoombom the conversation.
Allow the “waiting room” feature to be enabled. This allows the host to see and approve participants before they join the meeting.
Do not use the Record’ feature if it is not needed. The Record feature is available but can only be used if absolutely necessary by the host.
Zoombombers cannot enter the meeting room again if you disable the ‘Join before Host’ feature.
Limit screen sharing
Know your participants
Instruct participants to not forward the meeting URL to anyone else
If it is a large-scale public meeting,