image: Zoom

The United States Justice Department has issued an official warning against “Zoom-bombing”, a recent phenomenon that entails hackers infiltrating video meetings on popular video-conferencing platform Zoom and disrupting such meetings sometimes with vulgar content including pornographic footage and threatening language. The warning was issued in response to several incidents recorded in the past week, where hackers infiltrated online video conferences and classroom sessions.

The warning, issued on the Justice Department’s website under the US Attorney’s office for Michigan’s Eastern District, states that “Zoom-bombing” or in general video hacking is a crime that can bring along state or federal charges. Such charges may include “disrupting a public meeting”, “computer intrusion”, “using a computer to commit a crime”, “hate crimes”, “fraud”, or “transmitting threatening communications”. All of the aforementioned charges are punishable by fines and imprisonment under U.S. law.

The Justice Department has also urged enterprises and schools to take preventive measures against video hacking, measures including avoiding making video meetings public, avoiding sharing meeting links on public sites, and ensuring the use of the updated version of Zoom’s software. An update pushed out by Zoom in January added meeting passwords by default and disabled the ability to randomly scan for meetings to participate in.

Zoom has seen an outsized increase in user numbers as of late, from 10 million daily active users to more than 200 million in the past three months. Such outsized growth hasn’t been without problems, however. Zoom has faced security issues as of late, video hacking being one. As of late, security testers and experts have exposed certain flaws in Zoom’s security stack. They include thousands of private videos being accessible online, Zoom’s iOS app sending analytics data to Facebook regardless of whether a user had a Facebook account or not, and addresses and photos of some Zoom users being leaked out.

Zoom has responded to such security lapses with apparently quick moves. The company says it has disabled the Facebook data-sharing feature and has also issued patches for some other security lapses. Also, Zoom says it’s enacted a freeze in releasing new features in order to focus on its security and privacy issues. Additionally, the company says it’ll boost its existing security bug bounty program.