We know how Zoom rose into popularity as the coronavirus pandemic forced millions of people to stay at home.

 

Video conferencing became the only choice of most people in continuing their daily businesses: meetings, interviews socializing and even school activities. And to do these activities, the people’s platform of choice is, none other than, Zoom.

 

According to Bernstein Research and Apptopia, Zoom has increased its daily users from 10 million just this December of 2019 to a staggering 200 million users this March of 2020. This increase was unexpected that the CEO, Eric Yuan, was also in-shock with the drastic increase.

 

And because of these numbers of users—sharing information about themselves inside the platform—concerns about cybersecurity come into play.

 

Just last month, March, number of cases were reported where alleged “Zoombombings” occurred into different meetings displaying irreverent and shocking images or information, which was alarming provided that people can penetrate meetings easily.

 

And from then on, a lot of bugs were found and reported, which caused a number of big companies banning the use of Zoom in their company properties and personal devices. On April 1, Reuters reported that Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket company prohibited employees from using the app, citing “significant privacy and security concerns.” And yesterday, April 8, giant company, Google, banned the use of Zoom on company-owned employee devices for not meeting the company’s security standards.

 

Apparently, there were reports that Taiwanese and Canadian governments also turned their backs away from the platform.

 

While companies are looking for different ways to cope with quarantine, completely on the opposite side of Zoom, what are the steps Zoom takes to respond to these privacy and security issues? Well of course, those include the lawsuits it faces.

 

Not much really. But at least they are trying their best.

 

In the words of Yuan, he said in an interview: “We did not design the product with the foresight that, in a matter of weeks, every person in the world would suddenly be working, studying, and socializing from home. We now have a much broader set of users who are utilizing our product in a myriad of unexpected ways, presenting us with challenges we did not anticipate when the platform was conceived.”

 

Zoom would not actually see these cybersecurity concerns if no one forced them to look at their vulnerabilities. Recently, Zoom was forced to update their app in iOS. It was found out that there were codes that sent device data to Facebook. It was discovered that users were susceptible to their personal information being used to target ads. And reportedly, user information is also allegedly being leaked.

 

Earlier this month, Zoom announced the 90-day feature freeze to fix privacy and security issues. Yuan promised that they will “identify, address, and fix [the] issues proactively” and be “transparent throughout this process.” This 90-day plan is set to beef up its security policies, and this plan includes pressing a pause on developing new features for the app in order to focus on security measures to be injected in their current practice.

 

And just yesterday, Zoom tapped former Facebook Security Head, Alex Stamos, to get these issues over with. In his tweet, Stamos shared his chat with Yuan and his excitement to work with the team. It was determined that Stamos will be working on board with Zoom’s 90-day plan.

 

On top of that, Zoom has also created a new privacy and security board, with security heads from firms like VMware, Netflix, Uber and Electronic Arts to advise Yuan.

 

Do you have any cybersecurity concerns?

Let us know by emailing us at qtco.cpas@gmail.com