There is no doubt you have been involved with many Zoom video conferences in the past few months. As people across the world shifted to remote work, schooling, and socializing due to COVID-19 we have all been using more videoconferencing. If you hadn’t heard of Zoom before you most definitely have since the pandemic hit. Zoom has been most people’s choice for video conferencing during the coronavirus. This was in large part due to it’s ease of use and their generous offer to make the platform available for free to schools, teachers, and expanding their free options for businesses. However, with it’s rise in popularity, and a huge increase in users, also came security concerns. Many of these were due to people using the software without properly configuring some of the security features.
Security issues
Features like requiring meeting passwords to join, the ability to set up a “waiting room” where you could approve each user that entered, and requiring users to register for meetings were all available but not enabled by default. People were also sharing their meeting links in public via social media and on websites. This gave rise to what has become known as “zoom bombing” where a complete stranger can actually come into your meeting or chat and wreak havoc. Reports began to spread of school, business, and government meetings interrupted by Zoom-bombers who would jump on a meeting uninvited and share pornographic images, or use threatening or hate language. Needless to say, this caused many people to abandon the platform and some companies and schools to ban it altogether.
To their credit, Zoom faced up to these issues and quickly began pushing out small changes to their software to make it more secure. They enabled some of the security features by default while focusing all of their resources on improving security. Good news Zoom fans – they have released a new updated version that includes a lot of new security features to make it more secure. Zoom 5.0 is here and you should download it today!
So what’s new?
Zoom has introduced some room control features such as the ability to remove and ban participants, lock meetings, report users, and enable waiting rooms when a meeting is underway. Other security and privacy features include a new grouped security menu, default password-protected meetings, and the removal of meeting IDs from the Zoom interface so it’ll be harder for callers to leak them. They have also forced more complex meeting passwords and will be moving to AES 256-bit GCM encryption, which the company says will offer “increased protection” of data in transit and resistance to tampering.
Download it today
All users will be required to have GCM encryption and Zoom 5.0 to join meetings on May 30. If you wait and join a meeting after May 30th it will automatically update you to the latest version but why wait? Download Zoom 5.0 today and enjoy all the new security features they have added now.
