Video conferencing app Zoom has responded to complaints that its platform is not secure and has said it has introduced several security measures to address the users’ concerns.
The company’s CEO Eric Yuan had already assured in a blog post a few days back that they have set themselves a month’s time to rectify all bugs in their app. Now, Yuan has again shared some details online on the various steps being taken and implemented.
As per his version, by this weekend, say by April 18/19, the app will provide the option to the users to choose which regions their data is routed through. Now, this is because many users of Zoom had expressed the fear that the company’s servers were in China and any data going through that country may be subject to snooping by the Chinese government authorities. Zoom says the servers located in China are already ring-fenced or geofenced and the meeting data of the users from outside China will not be hosted there. This is now being strengthened by this option in the hands of the paid subscribers before the start of the meeting.
In his earlier post, the CEO had said the company has an ongoing bug bounty programme where anyone who can come up with security flaws in the app will be rewarded. This has been reiterated by him saying they have retained the services of a cybersecurity firm to revamp this bug bounty programme.
There have been reports that Zoom users’ login information is being sold on the dark web. To this, the company’s representative has said the stealing of credentials may be happening from the computers of the users and not necessarily through the Zoom app.
The other regular complaint against Zoom has been that of ‘Zoombombings’. This is like photobombing where some unrelated third person suddenly crops up in the discussion.
The company maintains that the sudden and unexpected zooming of the Zoom app’s usage from 10 million to 200 million due to the COVID-19 lockdown has put it into such an enviable position, and some of the technical issues now being reported are due to this sudden spike.
The Union Home Ministry had, only yesterday told all government departments to be cautious while using the app for video conferencing. Zoom may face legal hurdles as well, as some lawyers in the US are contemplating filing a suit against it for security breaches.