Zoom video communications is an American telecommunications company headquartered in San Jose, California. The company is listed on the NASDAQ. It was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, a Chinese-American Cisco Network engineer. It provides cloud computing enabled communications supporting video and online chat. The software platform by the company offers teleconferencing, remote systems and are now working on backup capabilities

In the wake of corona virus disease  2019 (COVID-19), governments, companies, charity organizations, agencies, families and friends have resulted to online meetings in an effort to curb the spread of the deadly virus that has so far killed over 200,000 human beings and infected over 2.8 million around the globe. In just three months, zoom users have ballooned from 10 million to over 200 million and still climbing, as companies and governments engage in online meetings in a social distancing effort.

Unfortunately, the company has come under scrutiny from western governments over the company’s ties with the Chinese communist government. As a result, the United States has banned the use of zoom in what it term “a cyber-threat”. Why? Below are some of the reasons.

• Zoom video software is developed in china.

The software platform of the company is developed by three companies in china. Of the three companies, only two of them are owned by zoom. The ownership of the third company (American cloud video technology) is unknown. This is an unusual trend by an American company.

• Call routing to Chinese servers.

The company admitted to the fact that some of the calls were “mistakenly” routed to Chinese based servers for encryption. The question is, since when did computers start making mistakes? Garbage in, garbage out. Right? The fact that the encryption keys are distributed across China makes American intelligence agencies panic. Chinese laws give the Chinese intelligence agencies power to compel technology companies to hand over communication encryption keys, should the users be deemed a threat to the ruling communist party. Zoom has since said that international calls won’t be routed to china but the damage is already done.

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• Zoombombing.

This is when an unwanted participant joins a meeting to disrupt a meeting. This prompted an official warning from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This vulnerability could mean that a third party can stealthily join a meeting secretly listen or record conversations. As of April 15^th 2020, there were two Zoom zero-days selling on the black market. Australian defense force banned Zoom after a famous comedian zoombombed a classified meeting.

• Unauthorized storage of data

According to the declassified FBI report as published by the New York Post, zoom keeps a log of IP addresses, web browsing history and bio-metrics. This is contrary to the European data protection rights as well as American and laws of other countries of the world. The issue of data retention was also not mentioned in their privacy policy. As a result, this is a huge threat in this age of online banking where unsecured credentials could be harvested by hackers. The FBI consequently advised the government to “move away” from ZOOM.

In March 2020, Zoom was sued in U.S. Federal Court for illegally and secretly disclosing personal data to third parties including Facebook, which was not disclosed in its privacy policy. The complaint alleged that the company’s “wholly inadequate program design and security measures have resulted, and will continue to result, in unauthorized disclosure of its users’ personal information”. U.S. Representative Jerry McNerney and others are pushing for answers to questions about Zoom’s privacy practices.

Meanwhile, institutions across the globe continue to ban use of Zoom or tell staff not to use the software. They include;

1. Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc.
2. Google
3. American space agency, NASA
4. United States Senate
5. The FBI
6. Federal government of Germany
7. The government of Taiwan
8. Australian Defense Force
9. British Defence ministry
10. Tech giant Space X as well as Tesla.
11. New York City