If you are serious about security, you should just stop using Zoom for meetings

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, several countries have ordered lockdown to contain the virus and so millions of people are forced to be inside their homes. To communicate with others, Zoom suddenly became the de facto choice by many users. Recently, Zoom revealed that it has 200 million daily active users, up from 10 million daily active users in December 2019. In a recent regulatory filing, Zoom has warned investors that their rapid growth is forcing them to invest in building out the service faster than they had planned.

There are two main reasons why Zoom became so popular. First, Zoom is free for regular users. Second, the Zoom user experience is really simple and an average consumer can quickly set up a meeting without any support. Due to the sudden usage spike, Zoom became the center point for security researchers around the world. Over the past few days, they have discovered numerous issues related to Zoom. We have covered some of them in the past, find them below.

• Zoom’s iOS app is sharing data with Facebook even if you don’t have a Facebook account
• Zoom meetings are not end-to-end encrypted after all
• Zoom vulnerability released which allows anyone you chat with to steal your Windows Login credentials
• A new Zoom vulnerability is leaking private data to strangers
• Thousands of private Zoom recordings are available for anyone to watch online
• A new Zoom vulnerability is leaking data from people’s LinkedIn profile
• Zoom admits some video calls were routed through China
• Zoom enables waiting rooms by default to prevent Zoombombing
• The Zoom client app on Mac installed a tiny web server without disclosing this to users. Even after removing the client, the web server continued to remain in the user’s Mac.

You can read about these issues in detail here. If you are serious about security and privacy, you should just stop using Zoom. You can’t compromise on your security and privacy for a better user experience. Yes, every software will have its own security issues, but Zoom seems to be lacking from basic security and privacy policies that are standard in the meeting solutions market right now. Zoom has fixed some of these issues already, but it’s hard to trust them now. More than general consumers, I’m worried about enterprise organizations that rely on Zoom every day for their internal communications. There are several alternative meeting solutions available right now. I’ve listed some of them below for your reference.

• Microsoft Teams
• Google Hangouts Meet
• Lifesize
• Cisco WebEx
• Microsoft Skype (for general consumers)
• Facebook Messenger  (for general consumers)

Source: The Citizen Lab