Zoom app not safe, says CERT-India; government officials advised not to use

Video meet app Zoom, which has become highly popular in the last few weeks, is not entirely safe. A new advisory from CERT-India states that the platform is not safe and should not be used by government offices or officials. According to the advisory which is available on the Cert-In website, people, barring government officials, who would like to use the Zoom app for private purposes can follow the guidelines. 

The platform has been in controversy over security issues. Several cases of app being hacked have emerged from across the globe. As per Cert-In, the guidelines are aimed to prevent unauthorised entry in the conferences being held, prevent an authorised participant to carry out malicious activities on the terminals of others in the conference and avoid DOS attacks by restricting users through passwords and access grant.

Following some such incidents, Zoom CEO Eric S Yuan apologised for the privacy and security issues in the video conferencing platform. He also announced a 90-day feature freeze for the app during which time the company would focus on improving the security and privacy of the platform. 

In a new blog post, the platform has confirmed new features for the app. Zoom account users and admins will now be able to set minimum meeting password requirements to adjust the minimum length and require letters, numbers, and special characters, or allow only numeric passwords. The users of Basic account will have alphanumeric password option on by default, Zoom wrote in a blog post.

Zoom is introducing longer meeting IDs to enhance the security of its platform. As a part of the changes, the one-time randomly generated meetings IDs for newly scheduled meetings and webinars will have 11 digits instead of 9. Users’ Personal Meeting ID (PMI), on the other hand, will remain the same.