Due to the coronavirus pandemic and the lack of effective vaccine, people all over the world are forced to stay at home. As a result, those who are still working from home have made Zoom a popular web conferencing app and service for the past month. Zoom’s service has been available since 2011, but for some reason, it’s only this year it has picked up traction. As it continues to gain popularity, so does security issues, particularly relating to privacy. Recently, ZOOM CEO Eric Yaun shared that it’s going to pause the development of new features for the next three months to give its team ample time to fix current privacy issues. While the company continues to strengthen its firewall, according to another report by Mashable, over 500,000 Zoom accounts are being sold already by hackers on the Dark Web.
Zoom has seen its resurgence from the past three months from 10 million to over 200 million daily active users. The 500,000 affected users may be small in comparison, but that’s still an enormous amount. You might be thinking that there’s been some sort of breach in data here, however, that’s not the case. Hackers have gained access to these accounts through credential stuffing. As described by Phonearena, “this type of cybersecurity attack usually consists of hackers obtaining credentials (like email addresses and passwords) and using them with other accounts to try to gain unauthorized access to platforms.”
Although most of the stolen accounts are old and inactive, some are still valid and being used. Cyble, a cybersecurity intelligence firm, found out that these Zoom accounts are being sold around April 1st. Additionally, the security company managed to purchase 530,000 accounts in order to warn these affected users. Aside from email and passwords, the information includes host keys and meeting URLs. If you’ve received an email from Cyble or Zoom regarding this incident, now may be the best time to update your credentials.
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