‘Zoom is malware’: why experts worry about the video conferencing platform
As coronavirus
lockdowns have moved many in-person activities online, the use of the
video-conferencing platform Zoom has quickly
escalated. So, too, have concerns about its security. In the last month,
there was a 535% rise in daily traffic to the Zoom.us download page, according
to an analysis from the analytics firm SimilarWeb. Its app for iPhone has been
the most downloaded app in the country for weeks, according to the mobile app
market research firm Sensor
Tower.
Even politicians and other high-profile figures, including the
British prime minister, Boris
Johnson, and the former US federal reserve chair Alan
Greenspan, use it for conferencing as they work from home. But security
researchers have called Zoom “a privacy
disaster” and “fundamentally
corrupt” as allegations of the company mishandling user data snowball.
On Monday, New York’s
attorney general, Letitia James, sent a letter to the company asking it to
outline the measures it had taken to address security concerns and accommodate
the rise in users. In the letter, James
said Zoom had
been slow to address security vulnerabilities “that could enable malicious
third parties to, among other things, gain surreptitious access to consumer
webcams”....