Elon Musk’s SpaceX bans Zoom over security concerns
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Elon Musk’s SpaceX bans Zoom over security concerns

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SpaceX, Elon Musk’s satellite company, has reportedly banned its employees from using video conferencing app Zoom.

According to Reuters, a memo was sent to all SpaceX employees citing “significant privacy and security concerns” as the reason for the ban.

This was then followed by an email to employees saying:

“We understand that many of us were using this tool for conferences and meeting support. Please use email, text or phone as alternate means of communication.”

The news comes days after the FBI warned of the growing number of hackers hijacking video conferences and online classrooms on Zoom, taking advantage of the growing number of people working from home during the pandemic.

“The FBI has received multiple reports of conferences being disrupted by pornographic and/or hate images and threatening language,” said the FBI’s Boston division.

Zoombombing as its commonly referred to, is when uninvited guests break into or disrupt your meeting, often shouting profanity, racial slurs, or putting disturbing or offensive images in their video feed.

In response, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan laid out his plans to immediately address the security of the platform.

In a blog post he said, that the platform was built “primarily for enterprise customers” and they “did not design the product with the foresight that, in a matter of weeks, every person in the world would suddenly be working, studying, and socializing from home”.

"For the past several weeks, supporting this influx of users has been a tremendous undertaking and our sole focus. However, we recognize that we have fallen short of the community's -- and our own -- privacy and security expectations,” he added.

Over the next 90-days the company will initiate a features freeze and shift its engineering resources to focus on “our biggest trust, safety, and privacy issues”.

In addition, Yuan will host weekly webinars to “provide privacy and security updates to our community”, start a CISO council and launch a review with third-party experts and representative users.

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