With orders to stay home, more and
more people are using teleconferencing services for work or to socialize with
family and friends from afar. While public health officials call it “social
distancing” what they are asking us to do is “physical distancing”, staying physically
well away from each other to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Keeping contact
with work colleagues, family, and friends is important to ensure that we keep
our sanity while we are physically apart.
Teleconferencing can be an
important tool to surviving this coronavirus. From press reports, it appears
that people have been flocking to teleconferencing apps and services in record
numbers. Many for the first time.
Security has become an issue for
one of these teleconferencing services. The FBI office out of Boston has issued
a warning that the FBI has received several reports of video-teleconferencing (VTC)
sessions being disrupted by pornographic and/or hate images and threatening
language. The service receiving the most attention for this activity is Zoom,
so the activity is called “Zoom-bombing.”
The FBI alert cited two instances
in the New England region, while others have been reported by the press. In one
instance in late March 2020, a Massachusetts-based high school teacher
conducted an online class when someone dialed into the session then yelled
profanity and shouted the teacher’s home address. During another Zoom session,
conducted by a second Massachusetts-based school, someone accessed the session
then displayed swastika tattoos on the video.
Reports of similar incidents along
with skyrocketing use of the Zoom app and services have revealed serious
security flaws in Zoom. The CEO of Zoom,
Eric Yuan, noted in a blog post on
April 1, that the growth of users went from
10 million daily users in December
2019 to 200,000 million users in March 2020. He also noted that the platform
was designed for enterprise customers, not for enterprise and consumer use. Mr.
Yuan listed a variety of measures that the company was doing and intended to do
to enhance the security of his product.
Things that you can do to protect your
session from intruders disrupting your meeting include:
·
Allow only signed-in users to join.
·
Lock the meeting.
·
Set up your own two-factor authentication.
·
Mute participants to control disruptive noise.
·
Do not share links to meetings on social media.
·
Use a waiting room to control entry of your participants.
Securing your business meetings or
your private conversations via teleconferencing is an important function that
you and the software that you use needs to address. When using a teleconferencing
app take some time to learn how it handles security.
FBI:
The Seattle Times:
Zoom:
Here are some alternatives to Zoom,
Windows Central:
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