India has issued another advisory against the insanely popular video conferencing app Zoom. The cyber co-ordination committee of the home ministry has advised safety procedures for users while using it. The home ministry has also warned government officials from using Zoom for any official purpose.
India's nodal agency for cyber security, Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) had warned that Zoom is not safe and prone to cyber breaches in early April itself. And now, the home ministry's CyCord has also re-iterated it.
"Zoom is not a safe platform," CyCord said in its latest communication, asking users to refer to CERT's early-April advisory. It also suggested a series of steps to ensure that mishaps don't happen, ranging from setting new username and password every time Zoom is used, enabling 'waiting room' so that users need to be cleared by the host before joining, limiting attendees from joining by using passwords, disabling 'join before host', locking meeting once all participants have joined etc
India is the latest country to express worries over the wildly popular app. Earlier, Taiwan had banned its government employees from using it, while America's FBI had issued advisory against it. Tesla's Elon Musk had also banned his staff from using it for office work.
The American app/website had shot into popularity in the last few weeks as the de-facto app of the post-lockdown of the globe, as an increasing number of people working or learning from home started using it. Zoom offers multiple-person video conferencing with PPT and chat options, webinars or even plain catching up. From corporates to school to even bored people in quarantine looking for the next best thing to human company, everyone had turned to Zoom.
But along with its popularity had come allegations of a lack of privacy as well as safety. Allegations surfaced of how Zoom's security and encryption features were below par, that it was sharing user data with Facebook, followed by news of Zoom accounts and passwords being sold on the dark web. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan himself apologised publicly, pointing out how Zoom was originally meant to service companies with their own network security and how they had been caught unawares by its massive increase in popularity by millions of people working from home.
