Most Zoombombing is not done by external hackers – they’re inside jobs

By Donna Lu

A teacher conducts an online meeting of a children’s choir

Laura Thompson/Shutterstock

As the popularity of video-conferencing software like Zoom has surged during the coronavirus pandemic, so, too, has the phenomenon of virtual gatecrashing, commonly known as Zoombombing.

This has included harassment, hate speech and offensive images being suddenly streamed into a virtual meeting, behaviour that has sometimes been tied to coordinated campaigns organised on internet message boards. In March, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement that it had “received multiple reports of conferences being disrupted by pornographic and/or hate images and threatening language”, and warned users to take security precautions …