As the coronavirus pandemic forced millions of people to stay home over the past two months, Zoom suddenly became the video meeting service of choice: Daily meeting participants on the platform surged from 10 million in December to 200 million in March, and 300 million in April.
With that popularity came Zoom’s privacy risks extending rapidly to massive numbers of people. From built-in attention-tracking features to recent upticks in “Zoombombing” (in which uninvited attendees break into and disrupt meetings, often with hate-filled or pornographic content), Zoom’s security practices have been drawing more attention — along with at least three lawsuits against the company.
Here’s everything we know about the Zoom security saga, and when it happened. If you aren’t familiar with Zoom’s security issues, you can start from the bottom and work your way up to the most recent information. We’ll continue updating this story as more issues and fixes come to light.
Academic and government meetings continued to endure abusive Zoombombings in a series of recently reported incidents. Witnesses have described the harassment to include racist language and images of child pornography.
In two Monday reports of Zoombombing, students at Fresno State and Bakersfield College were exposed to images of child pornography. The incidents have both prompted investigations by law enforcement. Earlier in April, a Zoombomber broke into a Berkeley high school’s classroom Zoom session and exposed himself to students while screaming obscenities at them, prompting school officials to suspend all video conferencing classes. In late March, a Georgia middle school online class was bombarded with pornography, as was an elementary school class in Utah in early April. A Zoom meeting of Oklahoma’s State Board of Education was disrupted on April 23 when Zoombombers flooded the videos chat channel with racial slurs. Reports continue to emerge detailing Zoombombings of city council and government meetings.
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