A virtual meeting with US Federal Reserve Board member Christopher Waller was disrupted by an unknown person who turned on porn during the conference. The organizers of the video conference in Zoom admitted that an unknown person managed to “hijack” the broadcast and share obscene images for all participants of the event. This is reported by Reuters, whose correspondent was present at the “captured zoom”.
The event was hosted by the Medium Banking Coalition of America (MBCA, includes banks with assets ranging from $10 billion to $100 billion). The organizers did not expect that this was possible in principle, so they did not have a plan "B". It was not possible to disconnect the burglar from the video conference, and it was decided to cancel the meeting. The MBCA has already promised to take measures to prevent similar situations from happening again in the future.
“We have been the victim of a teleconference or Zoom hijacking and are trying to figure out what we need to do in the future to ensure this never happens again. This is an incident that we deeply regret,” said MBCA Executive Director Brent Tjarks.
According to him, the organizers lost access to the functionality that allowed them to turn off sound and video for all conference participants. At the same time, the organizers have not yet been able to identify all the details of the incident, but they promised to investigate and identify those involved. The correspondent of the agency, who was present at the zoom call, said that one of the participants in the video conference under the pseudonym "Dan" began to show pornographic images to the rest of the meeting participants, but the organizers could not turn off his video and sound. In total, there were 220 participants at the event at that moment – representatives of the Fed, banks and journalists.
Zoom representatives did not respond promptly to a Reuters request for comment, but the company was repeatedly criticized for the lack of security of calls and the confidentiality of negotiations. Attackers easily got into closed meetings and disrupted them, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) even urged users not to publish links to conferences in the public domain. True, Zoom later updated the functionality and increased the level of protection for conferences.
Officially, the Fed said the event was canceled due to "technical issues." The agency notes that usually the level of security at such events is extremely high, so this situation is unlikely.