Josh Hendrickson
Zoom, once one of the biggest beneficiaries of the global pandemic, is lately seeing more bad news than good. After several schools and companies banned Zoom, two more entities have followed—Google and the U.S. Senate. For its part, Zoom is trying to right the ship by forming a security council.
According to The Next Web, Google sent out an internal email to employees explaining that Zoom would stop working on their work machines due to “security concerns” in the app.
The company later issued a statement confirming the move, explaining that Zoom’s desktop client doesn’t meet the company’s security standards. It did go on to say employees can use Zoom through a web browser or mobile for personal use.
For its part, Google already has a video conferencing app, Google Meet, and it’s not uncommon for companies to require employees to use company made tools for security if nothing else.
At the same time, the U.S. Senate has banned its members from using Zoom as well. The move follows a warning from the Senate’s sergeant-at-arms recommending against using the service.
Zoom knows it needs to address both trust and security issues, and it’s forming a security council for just that purpose. One of the first members of the commission is Alex Stamos, who served as Facebook’s Chief Security Officer from 2015 to 2018.
Before joining the council, he recently published a series of tweets discussing the severity of Zoom’s security lapses at length. He described Zoom’s issues as “shallow bugs” and a series of steps the company should take. Since then, he wrote a Medium post that goes into his new role.
The steps Zoom is already taking are encouraging, but clearly, the company has lots of work to do to regain trust from companies and governments alike.
