With most of the workforce being required to work from home, most people have turned to video chatting to stay in touch. But hackers have decided to be the new targets for their harassment.
Zoom bombing which is a term for video version of photo bombing, has become a new trend of hacking that has resulting major disruption to many video feeds. They find a link to a random chat, breach it and then post either obscene images or make such a nuisance that the call is forcibly ended. In one case involving a school, a man exposed himself to several students. In another incident, uninvited strangers crashed a Zoom meeting on cyberattacks. When the presenter started covering coronavirus disinformation posted to Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter, a Zoom bomber scribbled all over the screen, forcing the meeting to end early.[1]
Hackers are beginning to take advantage of virtual presenters lack of cyber awareness. If a meeting is set to public, anyone who can find the link to that meeting can join in. According to Roy Zur, cofounder and CEO of cybersecurity firm Cybint, bad actors can find these addresses simply by searching for “zoom.us” on social media sites like Facebook, where public meeting links are often posted. There are also dedicated forums on sites like Reddit, where Zoom bombing is described as “dedicated to the posting of Zoom Classroom Meeting IDs."
There are simple steps to prevent this. First, Do not post links on social media. Its unfathomable how many companies do this to get people to join. Second, set your Zoom settings to private, so that only those you send the link to are the only ones that enter the meeting.
[1] https://fortune.com/2020/04/02/zoom-bombing-what-is-meeting-hacked-how-to-prevent-vulnerability-is-zoom-safe-video-chats/