Zoom Got Big Fast. Then videobombers made it rework security

Back in March as the coronavirus pandemic gathered steam in the U.S., a largely unheralded video-conferencing service suddenly found itself in the spotlight.

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And just as quickly as Zoom became a household name for connecting work colleagues, church and school groups, friends, family, book clubs and others during stay-at-home lockdowns, it also gained a reputation for lax security as intrusive “videobombers” barged into private meetings or just spied on intimate conversations.

On April 1, following a wave of lawsuits over privacy breaches, CEO Eric Yuan ordered a halt to work on new features and vowed to fix the service’s weaknesses in 90 days. That time is up, and Zoom is ready to take a bow.

The work on “security and privacy is never going to be done, but it is now embedded in how we approach everything we do at Zoom now,” the company’s chief financial officer, Kelly Steckelberg, told The Associated Press in a recent interview. Zoom hailed some of the strides that it says it has made in a Wednesday blog post.

The most visible changes included a switch that automatically protected all meetings with passwords and kept all participants in a digital waiting room until the meeting host let them in.