When Covid-19 spread globally last spring, it made Zoom an immediate household name. 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. Even after Zoom password-protected its calls by default, the so-called zoombombing continued. 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—if not most of them—the real culprit is someone on the inside.
At 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 last year to get to the root of the zoombombing plague, one that affects not only Zoom but other videoconferencing services like Cisco WebEx and Google Meet. Stringhini and his fellow researchers, who specialize in how online communities coordinate malicious activity, monitored the organization of mass zoombombing actions on both Twitter and 4chan over the course of 2020.
Their findings point to a surprising conclusion: The majority of zoombombing cases the researchers observed began with a participant in the call posting the link publicly and inviting trolls and miscreants to attack it. Seventy percent of calls for zoombombing the researchers found on 4chan and 82 percent found on Twitter appeared to be this sort of inside job. The phenomenon is explained in part by another, less surprising finding: The majority of zoombombing—74 percent of those organized on 4chan and 59 percent on Twitter—targeted high school and college classes.
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