How and Why We Ditched Zoom
Posted: Wed Jan 29, 2025 7:11 am
The COVID-19 coronavirus, along with a bunch of problems, has given rise to many new words and phenomena. Just look at the words "quarantines", "covidarity" and "covidiot". Only the lazy don't "zoom" now, and remote work and telecommuting are no longer the preserve of freelancers alone. The popular video service Zoom has caused a major wave of "Zoom bombing". Have you heard of this? Or maybe you've encountered it but didn't know the name? If not, consider yourself lucky.
This article will be useful for managers and line employees who want to protect their company and personal data from cyber attacks, as well as those who want to stay up to date with digital trends and know how and where to apply them.
What are we talking about?
Imagine you and your team and the client are discussing an important project in a zoom usa whatsapp list conference and suddenly a porn video starts broadcasting. Everyone is confused and discouraged — consider the presentation ruined. What happened? You have become another victim of zoombombing. This is when unknown individuals interfere with other people's online meetings and cause trouble: they send participants files of indecent content, write nasty things in the chat, or turn on adult films.
If only that were all! You've probably heard about the recent scandal with Zoom, when thousands of videos of work conferences were made publicly available, and corporate and personal data leaked to Facebook, where it was then used for advertising purposes. It's monstrous that your company's confidential information ends up in the wrong hands, and you become a hostage to inadequate individuals. By the way, in our blog we've already talked about another Internet - the darknet with its dangers and inverted laws. But there is good news: you can protect yourself from hackers and even get rid of them completely, but to do this you need to go back to the roots.
How Zoombombing Came About
Before the pandemic, Zoom was just another video calling program used by about 10 million people. In the spring, its audience grew to 300 million: the lives of employees of many companies turned into a series of Zoom conferences. And toxic personalities did not fail to take advantage of this: bored slackers, pranksters and Internet trolls. These people deliberately create conflict situations, enjoying the reciprocal indignation, and then proudly post videos of their “achievements” on social networks.
Zoombombing has become difficult to disguise as harmless jokes. Attackers post personal data of meeting participants online and even threaten violence. The latest high-profile antics have fueled racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia. In the entire civilized world, such things are prosecuted by law. But professional zoombombers are difficult to identify on the Internet because they carefully hide their IP addresses. But several high-profile cases involving them have already taken place in the dock.
The security problems of Zoom itself played a significant role in the emergence of zoombombing. The fact is that video calls there are protected not by end-to-end encryption (E2E), but by transport encryption (TLS). With this type of encryption, the content of meetings is available to the platform owners, and therefore, to anyone. It is not for nothing that employees of Google, SpaceX and Apple are prohibited from installing Zoom on their work computers.
But it would be wrong to think that zoombombing is a sore spot of only one video service. Users of any public "video caller" risk becoming victims of cybercriminals. However, these risks can be minimized if you follow simple rules.
This article will be useful for managers and line employees who want to protect their company and personal data from cyber attacks, as well as those who want to stay up to date with digital trends and know how and where to apply them.
What are we talking about?
Imagine you and your team and the client are discussing an important project in a zoom usa whatsapp list conference and suddenly a porn video starts broadcasting. Everyone is confused and discouraged — consider the presentation ruined. What happened? You have become another victim of zoombombing. This is when unknown individuals interfere with other people's online meetings and cause trouble: they send participants files of indecent content, write nasty things in the chat, or turn on adult films.
If only that were all! You've probably heard about the recent scandal with Zoom, when thousands of videos of work conferences were made publicly available, and corporate and personal data leaked to Facebook, where it was then used for advertising purposes. It's monstrous that your company's confidential information ends up in the wrong hands, and you become a hostage to inadequate individuals. By the way, in our blog we've already talked about another Internet - the darknet with its dangers and inverted laws. But there is good news: you can protect yourself from hackers and even get rid of them completely, but to do this you need to go back to the roots.
How Zoombombing Came About
Before the pandemic, Zoom was just another video calling program used by about 10 million people. In the spring, its audience grew to 300 million: the lives of employees of many companies turned into a series of Zoom conferences. And toxic personalities did not fail to take advantage of this: bored slackers, pranksters and Internet trolls. These people deliberately create conflict situations, enjoying the reciprocal indignation, and then proudly post videos of their “achievements” on social networks.
Zoombombing has become difficult to disguise as harmless jokes. Attackers post personal data of meeting participants online and even threaten violence. The latest high-profile antics have fueled racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia. In the entire civilized world, such things are prosecuted by law. But professional zoombombers are difficult to identify on the Internet because they carefully hide their IP addresses. But several high-profile cases involving them have already taken place in the dock.
The security problems of Zoom itself played a significant role in the emergence of zoombombing. The fact is that video calls there are protected not by end-to-end encryption (E2E), but by transport encryption (TLS). With this type of encryption, the content of meetings is available to the platform owners, and therefore, to anyone. It is not for nothing that employees of Google, SpaceX and Apple are prohibited from installing Zoom on their work computers.
But it would be wrong to think that zoombombing is a sore spot of only one video service. Users of any public "video caller" risk becoming victims of cybercriminals. However, these risks can be minimized if you follow simple rules.