Southwest Washington Education (K-12)

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Zoom Video Conferencing – A silent threat

With the societal shutdown these past couple of months the use of video conferencing has increased. In particular school; teaches; school boards and related people have started to use video conferencing to support educational efforts. On these calls information (ID’s; passwords and personal information) can be exchanged and exposed. One of the rising stars has been the software called: Zoom https://zoom.us/zoomrooms   Why? It’s cheap. There are a number of conferencing software platforms that include: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-video-conferencing-software

No software is completely safe. Saying that choosing the lowest cost software is a common goal and public schools are no exception. Using common sense and trying to save the public money is a great goal. However, in the case of Zoom, there have been a number of security issues. Those issues have become of such a significant concern that a number of public entities have stopped the use of Zoom and forbidden it entirely. Who are those entities and are their actions reasonable?

Note: As we go to press this article about Zoom was just published on a tech site: https://gizmodo.com/zooms-latest-update-is-an-attempt-to-prove-its-not-a-th-1842861614?rev=1586903443544&fbclid=IwAR2W3YpM5OTRrq3wsmHgbDQxodyZuNi7NxCVDttWsU_DrxRAfxLMX05CM9I

Here is a list of entities we can find, as of the date of this article, that have taken action to stop use. It appears the list is growing daily:

The following 10 companies had the most respondents reportedly stop using Zoom because of security concerns:

  1. Tesla (100%)
  2. Salesforce (37%)
  3. Cisco (30%)
  4. Adobe (22%)
  5. Apple (21%)
  6. Microsoft (20%)
  7. Google (18%)
  8. Intel (17%)
  9. Expedia (15%)
  10. LinkedIn (12%)

The following 10 companies had the most respondents say they were worried their information may have been compromised during the Zoom breaches:

    1. Cisco (71%)
    2. Apple (55%)
    3. Microsoft (51%)
    4. Google (47%)
    5. LinkedIn (42%)
    6. Square (41%)
    7. Tesla (39%)
    8. SAP (38%)
    9. Intel (36%)
    10. Amazon (34%)

In addition to these companies the following national/international entities have also taken steps to stop the use of Zoom:

  1. US Senate
  2. NASA
  3. Australia
  4. Taiwan
  5. New York School system
  6. Clark County Nevada school district
  7. UK Defense Ministry

In Washington State there have already been instances of hacking and unwanted access to Zoom conferences. Is your school district using Zoom? The only way to find out is to ask. If you believe use of Zoom could be dangerous to the safety of information regarding your child then ask the district NOT to use Zoom. Only you can get them to act.

Note: On April 13, 2020, we emailed OSPI and shared information about the security issues and actions to stop it’s use. We asked them to report what they have done/are doing to deal with the situation. If we get an answer we’ll update this article.

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