Indian Home Ministry Cautions Users About Safety Concerns Of Zoom App-Video Conferencing Platform

Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has warned users of the Zoom app that use of the video conferencing application is not secure. As more and more staff are now working from home during the lockdown time, the video meeting app has become very popular around the globe. Many other countries have also expressed concern about the application’s protection. Germany, Singapore and Taiwan have already banned the application.

“Zoom is not a safe platform” said the Ministry of Home Affairs’ Cyber Coordination Center (CyCord) in a recent 16-page advisory.

The alert from the government comes after India’s nodal cyber security agency-India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-in)-had cautioned against the app’s vulnerability. The agency noted that there are major vulnerabilities in the software that can allow users vulnerable to cyber attacks, including leakage of sensitive office information to criminals.

In the new advisory, MHA asked users who still want to use Zoom to meet certain safety guidelines– like preventing unauthorized entry into the conference room, preventing an unauthorized individual from conducting malicious activities. Hackers do a DOS (denial-of-service) attack to render a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended user.

The government has reissued new guidance after several users protested about instances of passwords leaked and hackers hijacking video calls from conferences at midway from.