For the application of video conferencing Zoom, the crisis of the coronavirus has course the opportunity to add millions of new users, to with peaks of 200 million a day in these last few weeks.
But that also has been attracting the spotlight of the media and of experts in cyber security, which in recent days have not done more than to reveal new vulnerabilities and deficiencies in the handling of personal data by Zoom.
All of this is putting in danger the ground gained by the application, the people responsible have been proposed to preserve its reputation by promising security audits of third parties and weekly updates to go repairing the problems with Zoom to today, accompanied by ‘webinars’ for explanation.
In the words of company co-founder, Eric Yuan,
“We recognize that we have not complied with the expectations of privacy and security, both in the community as our own. What we deeply feel and, therefore, we want to share with you what we are doing to fix it”.
Thus, in addition to the promises audits and updates, Zoom has announced in these last hours that has resolved the vulnerability that allowed stealing credentials from Windows loginthat suppresses the controversial “follow-up care” and that freeze for 90 days adding new functionalityto have occasion to test to fund the operation of its platform.
Finally, the company has also issued a press release clarifying the news on their lack of encryption end-to-endin which he declared that
“In those meetings in which all participants are using customers to Zoom, and the meeting is not being recorded, the application encrypts all the contents of video, audio, screen sharing and chat on the client of the issuer, and not what we can decipher at no time point before it reaches the receiving client”.
NASA, Apple, and SpaceX say “No” to Zoom
These measures, however, may have come quite late: not only the FBI issued early this week a warning against resorting to Zoom-to organize meetings and classes online (because of the ‘zoombombing’the fashion of ‘hijack’ these videoconferences to broadcast pornographic videos), but today we have known that several giants of the tech industry do not allow their employees to use Zoom to treat issues related to their work.
We talked, nothing more and nothing less, that NASA and SpaceX (the aerospace company of the owner of Tesla, Elon Musk). SpaceX, for example, did so in an email released last march 28, to its more than 6000 employees, in which, although he claimed that “many of us were using this tool for conferences and meetings of support”, encouraged them to using email, text messages and phone calls as “alternative media”.
NASA has confirmed to Reuters, through its spokesperson Stephanie Schierholz, who has taken the same decision. In addition, it is the case of Applealready in the first days of march opted for telework by sending thousands of employees to their homes, and that only allows to use three applications with conferencing functions: Slack, Cisco WebEx / Jabber, and, of course, its own app to FaceTime.
Via | The Next Web & Reuters
Image | Zoom
it was originally published in
Engadget
by
Marcos Merino
.
