Ahead of Online School Opening, Repeated 'Zoom Bombing'... Zoom CEO Apologizes for 'Video Conferencing App' Issues

Using the video conferencing platform Zoom during a meeting [Photo by Reuters Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Seulgina Jo] Ahead of the domestic online school opening, as hackers worldwide have been intruding into video classes without permission and playing obscene videos, so-called 'Zoom bombing' incidents have surged, prompting the CEO of the video conferencing platform Zoom to issue an official apology. The company plans to halt all general development work for the next 90 days and focus on cybersecurity and personal information protection efforts.

According to economic media CNBC and others, CEO Yuan stated on his official blog on the 2nd (local time), "We did not meet users' expectations in terms of privacy and security," and "We apologize." This follows recent cyberattacks and privacy controversies targeting Zoom, with even the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) expressing concerns about Zoom's security. He bowed his head, saying, "We take the recent concerns very seriously."

Zoom, which allows up to 100 people to participate in a video conference simultaneously, has played a major role in spreading untact culture worldwide?from meetings of employees working remotely due to the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19) to online classes and gatherings with acquaintances.

On this day, CEO Yuan explained that daily users, which were around 10 million in December last year, increased to a maximum of 200 million in March. As more people stayed at home due to COVID-19, the number of Zoom application downloads also surged. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson used it in cabinet meetings, and domestically, the Ministry of Education directly recommended it ahead of online school openings, attracting attention.

However, recent cyberattacks and other incidents eventually led to the CEO's official apology. The newly coined term Zoom bombing refers to a type of trolling that disrupts Zoom video meetings or classes for malicious purposes by sharing obscene or hateful videos through the screen sharing function. Additionally, Zoom has been embroiled in privacy leakage controversies, such as an error where personal information of users accessing Zoom on iPhones was transmitted to Facebook without consent.

Accordingly, Zoom will suspend all general development work and concentrate the company's full capabilities on cybersecurity and personal information protection improvements for the next 90 days. The error that transmitted personal information to Facebook was immediately stopped as soon as the controversy arose. Zoom plans to include hacker intrusion prevention features in the default settings during video meetings and provide cybersecurity education to users.

Through a separate blog post, Zoom also introduced measures users can take to prevent Zoom bombing when participating in video meetings. It recommended always setting a password when hosting a meeting and individually sharing the meeting ID and password instead of the existing link when inviting others. It also emphasized not sharing such information on social networking services (SNS) or other online platforms where hackers can access it.

Users hosting meetings can also use the waiting room feature to screen participants. This allows unwanted participants to be filtered out in advance. This can be done by clicking advanced options in the settings tab.