(San Jose, CA) - Video conferencing software company Zoom has seen a massive surge in popularity with the Covid-19 pandemic as many workers embrace social distancing and work remotely. Just how big that surge is now clear:
"March this year, we reached more than 200 million daily meeting participants, both free and paid. We have been working around the clock to ensure that all of our users – new and old, large and small – can stay in touch and operational."
Zoom is widely regarded as a best-of-breed solution, allowing it to pummel Microsoft's Skype — an early player in the space that had a nearly 10-year start. But despite being so widely loved and now used, more and more information about Zoom's security and privacy issues has come to light, including:
- "Zoombombing"
- guessable meeting IDs
- sending copious personal user data to Facebook
- easy hijacking of users' cameras
- attention tracking
- misleading marketing about end-to-end encryption
It was with this astounding surge in use and a litany of security and privacy concerns that lead The Association of Assorted Internet Awards (AAIA) to award Zoom with the "Malware of The Year" award for March 2020.
"We've rarely seen such useful and widely-loved malware anywhere before. What they've accomplished is truly stunning. Rarely has anything been so useful and so riddled with privacy and security issues. They'll be a hard act to follow next year (April 2020). Also...I don't want to spoil anything, but we're looking at TikTok. Being surveiled and influenced by an authoritarian foreign government while watching 'flip the switch' takes? (chef's kiss) beautiful", said a spokesperson for the AAIA in charge of the nomination process.
When reached for comment, an employee at Cisco Webex gleefully noted that "I knew there had to be a catch. You can't write software that's both good and secure...at least not here." At press time Zoom had reluctantly accepted the award and vowed to do better in an acceptance speech posted on their blog. "We're definitely going to fix these things, especially now that we've cornered the market and have no real competition", a Zoom spokesperson said.