Cloud Hosting

Zoom is wildly popular, but it's now under scrutiny for security and privacy issues. Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Zoom is wildly popular, but it's now under scrutiny for security and privacy issues.

Updated at 11:22 a.m. ET

Dennis Johnson fell victim last week to a new form of harassment known as "Zoombombing," in which intruders hijack video calls and post hate speech and offensive images such as pornography. It's a phenomenon so alarming that the FBI has issued a warning about using Zoom.

Like many people these days, Johnson is doing a lot of things over the Internet that he would normally do in person. Last week, he defended his doctoral dissertation in a Zoom videoconference.

He had a big audience he estimated it was about 40 people, including "my closest friends, family and my classmates and my dissertation committee" at California State University, Long Beach, he said.

Johnson is the first member of his family to graduate from college, let alone get a doctorate. He wanted to share the moment with them.

He said he was in the middle of presenting when someone started drawing male genitalia on the screen. At first, Johnson said, he was not sure what was happening.

"I'm like, 'Whoa!' And then I freeze, and everyone who's watching the screen freezes," he said.

It got worse. The attacker scrawled a racial slur that everyone on the Zoom call could see.

Johnson was horrified. The organizers blocked everyone's screen until they could remove the intruder from the meeting. But, Johnson said, they were not able to identify that person.

Although he was shaken, Johnson managed to finish his presentation. But what should have been a triumphant celebration was ruined.

"The moment they [told] me, 'Congratulations, Dr. Dennis Johnson,' and it's all over and I leave the Zoom meeting, everything sets in," he said. "I couldn't even, like, communicate. I had to just walk out [of] my house. ... I didn't want to talk or see anybody."

Zoombombers have disrupted an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in New York, Sunday school in Texas, online classes at the University of Southern California and a city meeting in Kalamazoo, Mich.

With schools closed and millions of people working from home, Zoom has become wildly popular. The company said 200 million people used the app on a daily basis in March, up from just 10 million in December. But that newfound popularity is bringing new scrutiny.

The FBI is warning schools, in particular, to be careful.

"The FBI has received multiple reports of conferences being disrupted by pornographic and/or hate images and threatening language," the bureau's Boston office said this week.

As concerns have arisen, Zoom has worked to address them. It published a guide last month on how users can protect meetings. It also changed settings for accounts used by schools and universities to make their meetings more private by default.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has sent a letter to Zoom asking about its security and privacy protections.

"Things you just would like to have in a chat and video application strong encryption, strong privacy controls, strong security just seem to be completely missing," said Patrick Wardle, a security researcher who previously worked at the National Security Agency.

He and other researchers have turned up flaws in Zoom's software that could let hackers spy through a computer's webcam or microphone. Zoom says it released fixes for these issues on Wednesday.

The website Motherboard found that Zoom was sharing data with Facebook, even data on people who are not Facebook users.

Zoom says that was a mistake and that it stopped sharing that data in March, but it's now facing a class action lawsuit.

Wardle says Zoom may be easy to use, but he is wary of its track record.

"This product was designed to prioritize things other than privacy and security," he said.

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in a blog post Wednesday that the company is freezing work on new features to focus on fixing its privacy and security problems.

"We recognize that we have fallen short of the community's and our own privacy and security expectations," he wrote. "For that, I am deeply sorry, and I want to share what we are doing about it."

Editor's note: Zoom is among NPR's sponsors.

Read the original:
A Must For Millions, Zoom Has A Dark Side And An FBI Warning - NPR

Businesses are increasingly viewing the practice of gathering information through sensors and controlling a variety of physical systems as an important part of their IT infrastructure. As evidence of that trend, research firm IDC in its latest global spending forecast said it expects businesses to spend $1.1 trillion on IoT projects in 2023.

But to make those IoT projects possible, businesses rely on a variety of vendors to cover everything from the hardware and security to the software and connectivity, as well as solutions that allow businesses to draw data from industrial control systems. And in many cases, the products from these vendors need to be combined for businesses to realize their full value.

When you end up with one of these complex solutions, you could have 15 vendors in a single solution, said Pam Miller, director of infrastructure channels research at IDC, in an interview with CRN.

Vendors alone, however, cant get businesses to the IoT finish line. By 2021, more than 75 percent of organizations plan to turn to solution providerswhether they be system integrators, managed service providers or value-added resellersto handle the complex integration, software development, management and support work necessary for IoT, according to an IDC FutureScape 2020 report.

Most companies dont have an IoT guy. They dont have advanced analytics in-house, Miller said. Thats why, increasingly, theyre looking to channel partners, service providers and various other people that have those skills on board to be able to help them get to the solution theyre looking for.

But its not just as simple as vendors opening arms to solution providers. Solution providers are looking for building blocks they can use to more easily scale solutions to multiple customers and focus on value-added services.

What we in the IT channel are looking for is a packaged solution that we can sell, said Luis Alvarez, president and CEO of Alvarez Technology Group, a Salinas, Calif.-based solution provider that has made inroads in connected agriculture with IoT building automation vendor KMC Controls.

We dont want to have to go out and buy a bunch of components and create our own thing, Alvarez said. We want to be able to say, Hey, we have this package for greenhouse management, or we have this package for building management, we know how it works, we can install it, we can sell it, we can make money.

Whats made it easier for solution providers to adopt IoT and work with a variety of hardware and software solutions is the connectivity work being done by cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, according to Stephen DiFranco, a former Broadcom and Lenovo executive who is founding principal of IoT Advisory Group.

These tools are now coming online from Google, from Amazon and from Microsoft, which make plugging endpoint devices into the cloud a lot easier, he said.

There is also work being done by OEMs like Cisco Systems and Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company to curate and build native support for a variety of applications on their systems.

Youre starting to see them now build libraries of applications that can sit on top of their network that partners can sell, DiFranco said. And this is really valuable because the partners are really having a hard time with sorting out, which app should I use?

With IoT moving demand for high-performance computing from the cloud to the edge, solution providers now have an opportunity to build out and manage a new kind of network topology that consists of endpoints, edge gateways and cloud servers, according to DiFranco. And its from there that a new foundation of applications and business value can be created.

I think what were going to see in IoT is really the big brands bringing along on the back of their hardware [the] software solutions to help connect, compile, collect and calculate data, he said. I think its really going to be through that.

For solution providers just getting started in IoT and those who have already established businesses in the field, CRN presents the 50 coolest IoT companies of the year across connectivity, hardware, industrial IoT, security and software.

The 10 Coolest IoT Connectivity Companies

5G may be coming for IoT in the future, but the need for connectivity is now. What follows are the 10 coolest IoT connectivity companies of 2020.

The 10 Coolest IoT Hardware Companies

Innovations in hardware are enabling a variety capabilities in IoT, including AI performance and 5G. What follows are the 10 coolest IoT hardware companies of 2020.

Read more:
2020 Internet Of Things 50: Realizing The Promise Of IoT - CRN: Technology news for channel partners and solution providers

Ken Colburn, Special for The Republic Published 6:00 a.m. MT April 6, 2020

Marilyn Rodriguez, top left, held an election day watch party via Zoom on March 17, 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.(Photo: Submitted by Marilyn Rodriguez)

Question: Is it safe to use Zoom for my video conferences or should I consider something else?

Answer: With most of the country under a stay-at-home order, the use of video conferencing has skyrocketed.

Zooms user numbers reportedly went from around 10 million daily users in December to more than 200 million in March.

Whenever anything on the internet gets this popular, it attracts both security researchers and those with malicious intent.

Zoom has been dealing with a number of privacy and security problemsthat has led to the banning of the service by SpaceX and NASA for their employees: seekingalpha.com.

To their credit, Zoom has updated their software to block the various exploits discovered by researchers and are focusing on improving security and privacy for all users:blog.zoom.us.

One of the most common problems with the Zoom platform is from uninvited attendees that disrupt the video chat with a variety of antics, referred to asZoom-bombing.

Its photo-bombing on steroids as trolls post vulgar comments, pornographic images, and racist epithets to unsuspecting users, usually in a large gathering.

Its caused many online gatherings to shut down as new users dont understand how to securely host a meeting. The very thing thats made Zoom so popular its ease of use is also what made it very easy for those with little experience to be exploited.

Many hosts made the mistake of publishing their meeting link on social media or other public methods that made it easy for pranksters to crash the party.

If youre going to host a Zoom meeting, itsimportantthat you get up to speed on the settings that will reduce the chances of outside disruption.

Two basic steps you should start with are to use an Instant or Scheduled Meeting ID (support.zoom.us) instead of your Personal Meeting ID - and turning on the Waiting Room option.

Your Personal Meeting ID is like a permanent reserved room for you, so if someone outside of your group acquires it, they caninterrupt any meeting you host.

The Waiting Room (support.zoom.us) gives you control over when and if a participant joins a meeting.Everyone that is attempting to join is kept there until you admit them, one at a time or all at once.

Cornell University has published an excellent checklist to securing Zoom at:it.cornell.edu.

If you dont need a platform where everyone can be seen or dont need to host alarge number of people, there are lots of options that may be more suitable.

Apple expanded FaceTime to 32 users some years ago, but this means that all attendees must have an Apple device to join.

If your group has users with a variety of devices and operating systems, you can use Google Hangouts (hangouts.google.com) on any device as long as they each have a Google account.

If you dont really need video on the call, you can use tools like Uber Conference (uberconference.com) to hold meetings which uses moving avatars so youll know whos speaking at any given time.

If you want a more controlled broadcasting tool for connecting with a large group, check out StreamYard (streamyard.com), which can also simulcast to YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitch.

Ken Colburn is founder and CEO of Data Doctors Computer Services,datadoctors.com.Ask any tech question atfacebook.com/DataDoctorsor on Twitter@TheDataDoc.

Read or Share this story: https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/tech/2020/04/06/using-zoom-while-working-home-heres-how-stay-safe-video-calls/2942713001/

Go here to see the original:
Worried about using Zoom? Here are video tips and alternatives - AZCentral