Zoom security problems? In this post we delve into this topic.

Are you using Zoom? Everyone who’s had to work, or do schoolwork, from home during the coronavirus lockdown seems to be using the video-conferencing platform for meetings, classes and even social gatherings.

There are good reasons Zoom has taken off and other platforms haven’t. Zoom is easy to set up, easy to use and lets up to 100 people join a meeting for free. It just works.

But there’s a downside. Zoom’s ease of use makes it easy for troublemakers to “bomb” open Zoom meetings. Information-security professionals say Zoom’s security has had a lot of holes, although some have been fixed over the past few months.

There’s also been scrutiny of Zoom’s privacy policies, which until recently seemed to give Zoom the right to do whatever it wanted with users’ personal data, and its encryption policies, which have been more than a tad misleading.

Zoom’s main issue that hit it very hard in the end was the fact that it failed to build in security from the start. Now, Zoom has put mechanisms in place to make sure that “security and privacy remain a priority in each phase of its product and feature development,” Yuan said.

But there is still work to be done, Yuan admits: “Privacy and security are ongoing priorities for Zoom, and this 90-day period—while fruitful—was just a first step,” he said.

Jake Moore, cybersecurity specialist at ESET sees Zoom’s security changes as “sufficient.” However, he thinks all firms should learn from the video conferencing platform’s mistakes: “Companies need to focus on security by design whatever size they predict they will be, especially those businesses dealing in private communications.”

Even so, Zoom’s honest and open approach has saved it a lot of headaches as it has worked to become better: “Zoom magnanimously owned up to its mistakes, pledged to make changes and then delivered. In my book, this is more noble that those companies that have tried to bury a data breach or refuse to own up to being hit with ransomware,” Moore says.