Digital Learning and “Zoom Bombing:” the latest internet hacking prank

By Brandy Sloan

In the wake of the coronavirus lockdowns, schools have attempted to keep student’s education on track by switching to online methods of teaching. Most teachers decide to post essential assignments with flexible due dates to accommodate for student’s varying home life situations. Though others may choose to switch to virtual lessons using technology like Zoom and Google Hangouts. 

One platform that teachers use to host live video chat lectures is Zoom. In recent days, Zoom has accumulated an infestation of Zoom chat intruders that interrupt their lectures and do obnoxious and/or wildly inappropriate things whilst in the video chat. These intruders have since been connected to Youtube, not only hurting themselves but also diminishing the reputation of Yotubers now as well. 

  The act has now been coined as “Zoom bombing” and often causes drastic shifts in the lesson plans teachers believe is best to pursue. On one occasion, a hacker with a Zoom Conference ID came into a test session meant for students of the University of Arizona, forcing the professor to stop the test and subsequently leave the testers to do it on their own time. 

The whole ordeal can foreseeably take a toll on education, leaving students and teachers with their hands tied and in a state of hopelessness as to what form of learning they actually can receive. The CEO of Zoom, Eric Yuan, eventually addressed these concerning interruptions in a message to users. He explained that the sudden drastic spike in users and thereafter, unsatisfied users, has put the company in a bad spot. He goes onto assert that changes are coming soon but the sudden overload of problems and high volume of users has made it difficult to change those things as opposed to if they had gradually expanded. 

With that being said, this entire situation is still pending and much is left to question when it comes to how this will be handled exactly. All that can be said at this point is that, as Zoom is one of the only platforms mass amounts of people can video chat on at the same time, and workers at Zoom are doing all they can to combat this problem, and until it is fixed, it is always best to stay patient and hopeful of a full extermination of the hackers involved.