Whatever happened to zoombombing?
In case you’d forgotten, zoombombing was a practice that emerged during the first phase of the pandemic, when large numbers of us suddenly found ourselves working from home and having to videoconference using Zoom and other tools. The problem was that there was little to prevent anybody who had the URL of the videoconference from trolling or sabotaging it with pornographic, scandalous or politically incorrect images.
This is the classic quiet news day story that the media turns into a major event: from a few isolated cases of meetings being unpleasantly disrupted, some of them during online school classes, the term captured the collective imagination until Zoom, which had grown from 10 million daily users to 200 million in three months, adopted a few simple security practices, as default passwords for meetings and providing tools to kick out the uninvited; in the United States, zoombombing was even declared a federal crime liable to a prison sentence.
As a result, from May 2020, it took a dead donkey day for a zoombombing to make the news. In the meantime, how many IT departments had decided not to adopt Zoom in the extremely unlikely event of a troll suddenly bursting into a meeting?
Statistically speaking, the chance of a zoombombing was always relatively small, even during classes being delivered by videoconference in schools to…
