ZOOM: THE ISSUES AND THE ADVANCEMENT

aboveeidea.home.blog — Since COVID-19 has been spread the entire nations, public activities are being closed and the governments in every country give a solution to prevent and decrease the spread of coronavirus by making the rules for everyone to do their works in/from their homes. It’s called Work From Home (WFH). Company meetings, students’ learning process, and any works that can be held online use the online meeting apps and platforms to continue their work. One of them that has quickly escalated the use of the video-conferencing platform is Zoom.

According to Guardian, In the last month, there was a 535% rise in daily traffic to the Zoom.us download page. It makes a significant increase of Zoom profit. A data we got, shows the wealth of Eric Yuan, the founder of Zoom, has increased to US$. 429 Million. No doubt, it’s because Zoom can be categorized as an easy app to use (easy to operate) even for elementary school students. Other platforms such as Google Meets, Microsoft Teams, etc, are taken off by Zoom. Zoom is easy to set up, easy to use and lets up to 100 people join a meeting for free. However, security researchers have called Zoom “a privacy disaster” and “fundamentally corrupt” as allegations of the company mishandling user data snowball.

Even Zoom has recruited a former Facebook Security Principle, yet the users’ privacy data still being a problem. Here’s what we summary from any medium:

• A report from Motherboard found Zoom sends data from users of its iOS app to Facebook for advertising purposes, even if the user does not have a Facebook account. The Motherboard story was cited in a lawsuit filed in a federal court in California in the first week of April, accusing Zoom of failing to “properly safeguard the personal information of the increasing millions of users’ on its platform.
• There is a feature “attention tracking” which allows a host to see if a user clicks away from a Zoom window for 30 seconds or more. This feature would allow employers to check if employees are really tuned in to a work meeting or if students are watching a classroom presentation remotely and this feature has been criticized
• In 2019, it was revealed Zoom had quietly installed a hidden web server on user devices that could allow the user to be added to a call without their permission. And a bug discovered this week would enable hackers to take over a Zoom user’s Mac, including tapping into the webcam and hacking the microphone.
• According to Guardian, On 30 March, the FBI announced it was investigating increased cases of video hijacking, also known as “Zoom-bombing”, in which hackers infiltrate video meetings, often shouting racial slurs or threats.

Knowing from those explanations, we wonder, Is it safe to use Zoom? Well, Benjamin (a character from Who Am I) once said, “No system is safe” and people have different principles in their lives. However, Zoom is still safe to use in several cases. Activities such as school classes, friend conversation (meeting with friends just for fun), or even workplace meetings that stick to routine business, Zoom should be fine to use. Just don’t forget to ask that meeting participants sign in with a password, there’s not much risk in using Zoom.

The situation will be vice versa if you use Zoom for discussing state or corporate secrets, or disclosing personal health information to a patient. That’s the reason why Google permits its functionaries to use Zoom for corporate meetings. If you do so, your privacy (high-risk-privacy) will be at risk. To deal with these issues, Yuan wrote, Zoom would be “enacting a feature freeze, effectively immediately, and shifting all our engineering resources to focus on our biggest trust, safety, and privacy issues”.

Read Also: How to Keep Your Friendship Great, Healthy, Even Long-lasting!

According to Tomsguide, here the list of Zoom privacy and security issues and the latest status which being fixed by Zoom.

• Zoom-meeting video recordings saved on Zoom’s cloud servers can be easily discovered and often viewed. Status: Mitigated with additional obstacles against attack, but not fixed yet.
• Usernames and passwords for more than 500,000 Zoom accounts are being sold or given away in criminal marketplaces. Status: unknown
• Zoom flaw allowed account hijacking. Status: Fixed
• ‘Potential security vulnerability’ with Zoom file sharing. Status: Fixed
• A backdoor for Mac malware. Status: Yuan’s blog post says Zoom has fixed this flaw
• Windows password stealing. Status: Yuan’s blog post says Zoom has fixed this flaw
• And there are issues which in fixing progress and unknown such as: Sharing of personal data with advertisers; Zoom software can be easily corrupted; Leaks of email addresses and profile photos.

Finally, we arrived for the main information. For those who already use Zoom and still in worry, here we have suggestions for you to make you surely protect your account (email, etc) and make you feel safe when using Zoom or even other platforms.

The first one, you can activate your Gmail account feature, “two-factor authentication”. By activating that feature, strangers who want to open your account will get harder to open it.

Secondly, you can check your account. You can use a free service such as “Have I Pwned” or “Pwnquerry” that can trace is your email and password which you use to access Zoom, overspread on the internet (web). If it so, you must change your account’s password with a unique code or sentence which you never used it before. Because hacking can disseminate to your social media accounts or even leakage of your e-banking account!

Third, according to Lifehacker, these precautions can be taken if you already feel something’s wrong in your Zoom account. You can directly change the ID of your private meeting so that later hacker accounts cannot enter your meeting room. If it’s already done, then you can immediately do the click that says “Remove Me from All Devices”. By doing this, your Zoom account will automatically exit from all devices registered with your account. After that, do the first step where you have to change the password with a different password from before.

Even there is no safe system, being aware and making prevention are the best moves

Originally published at http://aboveeidea.home.blog on April 20, 2020.