If you’re someone who has been active on the internet amid this pandemic, then you must have been listening to a lot of news regarding Zoom- the Chinese video conferencing platform. The increased work from home culture during this lockdown across the world has caused an unprecedented hike of 280 million new accounts on this platform in a span of merely 4 months.

This sudden hike in the usage of zoom was soon followed by multiple negative reports regarding vulnerability and privacy compromise aspects of this tool. Even if you’re not a Zoom user, the following piece of information will help you understand the potential danger you’re currently exposed to because of using any such service.

1. In an investigation conducted by “Motherboard” – a tech group, it was found that zoom used to collect and send user data to Facebook even of those who didn’t have a Facebook account. This led to the filing of a lawsuit against zoom for violating data protection law.
2. It was found and later accepted by zoom as well that its calls weren’t end-to-end encrypted leading to potential eavesdrop attacks.
3. A former NSA hacker identified a vulnerability in zoom which was specific to Windows users due to which malicious hackers could assume control of the communication mediums of the device like webcam and the microphone of the zoom users and could keep an eye on them all the time. Also, the hackers were able to attain the highest level of administrative access to the windows device (root access) and could easily steal passwords and private data of the user.

4. A severe issue found with Zoom was that hackers could easily find out the live meeting IDs of unprotected conferences (which do not use passwords to connect) using an automated tool named ‘zWarDial’. Hackers could easily spy on any ongoing confidential discussions. 

5. Washinton Post investigated a very scary aspect of Zoom last April. A huge number of recordings of the calls performed over zoom were found in an unencrypted form accessible to any person. Those calls included extremely confidential information related to companies and universities.
6. In a report by Bleeping computers, it was revealed that towards mid-April, over 500,000 Zoom account credentials were being sold on the dark web at extremely cheap rates thus exposing passwords patterns of users.  
7. A very heinous attack was made on zoom because of its widespread use for online classes in schools. Alarming images of child pornography were displayed by crooked hackers in the class session happening on zoom, thus proving the inefficiency of maintaining the security of the calls over zoom.

Protect and monitor your Debit Card, Credit Card numbers, Bank Accounts, PAN, Social Media Accounts, Email Ids, and much more with IDFence, and ensure that your data doesn’t wander at the wrong places such as Dark Web, illegal theft forums, etc.

 And most importantly, STAY HOME STAY SAFE.