Zoom Credentials Exposed on the Dark Web
Written by: Jack Loomis
Due to recent events, we’re seeing a lot more of our country’s workforce now working from home. Because the need for business doesn’t stop, employers are often opting to take advantage of the deals offered by Zoom to hold meetings with clients and employees virtually. This is a great tool, however Zoom has come under quite a bit of scrutiny lately.
Major companies like Google and even the US Department of Defense have turned their eyes away from Zoom due to the lack of security associated with the company’s virtual meeting software. Lack of end to end encryption means that data can be breached while it’s being transmitted from one person to another. With an internet streaming service, data is constantly being transmitted over the internet which means essentially, your meetings are not secure.
For businesses that still want to take advantage of Zoom’s virtual meetings, there has been an even more recent finding: 530,000 accounts were put up for sale on the dark web. While Zoom didn’t want to respond to people seeking answers, it can be assumed that a lot of this information was gathered from other breaches as well, which is how the numbers tend to get so high. This is another lesson in cybersecurity: not reusing the same password for multiple accounts. This can be achieved easily nowadays with a password manager: a piece of software that allows you to generate complicated passwords, but also stores them in a secure vault that you can then use when you go to sign in to a website. Not only does this solve the problem of reusing passwords in multiple places, but it also ups your password strength game with random letters, numbers, and symbols which makes your password much harder to crack for hackers.
Zoom is just one of the many companies to fall under scrutiny for such a breach, and will likely not be the last. Protecting ourselves online is a proactive task, and requires knowing the issues and applying the fixes to increase your defense against cyber attackers. This is even more true now with the rapid increase in remote workers now conducting their business almost completely online. If you’d like to learn more, or would like to speak with someone at Southshore Managed IT Group about security services, please reach out at 219-226-3386.
