Seventy percent of calls for Zoom-bombing that researchers found on 4chan and 82 percent found on Twitter appeared to be this sort of inside job. Their findings point to a surprising conclusion: The majority of Zoom-bombing cases the researchers observed began with a participant in the call posting the link publicly and inviting trolls and miscreants to attack it. Stringhini and his fellow researchers, who specialize in how online communities coordinate malicious activity, monitored the organization of mass Zoom-bombing actions on both Twitter and 4chan over the course of 2020. Now one team of researchers has an answer for why many of the measures to secure Zoom calls haven't stopped the scourge: In many cases-perhaps even most of them-the culprit is someone on the inside.Īt the USENIX Enigma security conference today, Boston University computer scientist Gianluca Stringhini plans to present the results of research that he and a team from BU and Binghamton University carried out over the past year to get to the root of the Zoom-bombing plague, one that affects not only Zoom but also other videoconferencing services like Cisco WebEx and Google Meet. Even after Zoom password-protected its calls by default, the so-called Zoom-bombing continued. But while the videoconferencing platform offered a lifeline for the socially distanced, it soon suffered rampant intrusions from trolls crashing Zoom calls to insult participants, shout racist slurs, and display obscene images. When Covid-19 spread globally last spring, it made Zoom an immediate household name.

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