Zoom Adds New Security Measures To Avoid "Zoombombing"

Zoom will soon trigger passwords and ready rooms for all conferences by default in an attempt to help avoid "Zoombombing," or the current trend of individuals disrupting uninvited Zoom conferences and posting beautiful and even pornographic content. The new defaults would bring considerable complexity to the process of entering a meeting — a process that Zoom had previously designed to accelerate its development as friction-less as possible. The changes will have an effect beginning 5th of April.

For new conferences, prompt conferences, and conferences you entered with a gathering ID, zoom passwords have already been switched on by default — what's fresh at the beginning of April 5th is that they'll be switched on as effectively for already scheduled Zoom meetings. And you'll have to wait for the host to allow you in from the new virtual waiting room once you have entered a group. Meeting host can choose to let people in from the waiting room individually or all at once.

The use of Zoom has skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic as individuals turned to the online video conference service to communicate with relatives, friends, households and colleagues. But the increased use has also made the website, mostly via Zoombombing, a tool for hacks, pranks, and abuse. The problem has become serious enough that federal prosecutors now warn that there may be significant legal consequences for the perpetrators of the Zoombombing.

The new default safeguards provided by the service can also fix certain security concerns with the application. Yesterday, some security researchers had created an automated tool ready to set up 100 non-password-protected Zoom assembly IDs in an hour and scrape information about these conferences — maybe Zoom's latest default password coverage will prevent comparable scanning tools from sooner or later discovering assembly IDs and personal data. Zoom revealed yesterday that it would freeze 90 days to release new features so it can concentrate on addressing privacy and security problems with the app.

The new changes could be seen in the video below from Zoom-