The number of daily participants in the Zoom video conferencing app grew by another 50% to 300 million in the past three weeks as the company fought to quell a response about security and safety, with a number of governments and companies using its applications have banned.
Zoom’s stock, which has nearly quintupled since the company went public in March last year, rose 12% to a record high of $ 168.24 on Thursday. Chief Executive Eric Yuan released the figures late Wednesday in an update on the platform’s 90-day security plan, while also outlining next week’s rollout of a new version of the app with more encryption features.
German automaker Daimler was the latest company on Thursday to say it had banned Zoom for all company content until further notice. “There have been some reports of security gaps and challenges regarding Zoom’s data protection,” said Christoph Sedlmayr, spokesperson for Mercedes-Benz Cars.
“This does not meet our company’s security requirements. Therefore, we can confirm that Daimler prohibits the use of Zoom for company content until further notice.” Bloomberg News also reported that the wireless technology company NXP had banned the use of the app from outside parties and Ericsson employees in Sweden had been advised not to use it.
“We have not banned employees from using a collaboration tool, but we recommend that employees exercise caution with unapproved collaboration tools because of security risks,” said an Ericsson spokesperson. Zoom has been banned by many schools around the world, Elon Musk & # 39; s company SpaceX, Asia-based Standard Chartered bank and governments in Germany, Taiwan and Singapore.
A Zoom spokesperson reiterated that companies around the world have conducted comprehensive security assessments of his platform and used his services. The coronavirus-driven lockdown of millions of people worldwide has led to massive growth in the use of platforms such as Zoom, Skype or Microsoft’s Teams application.
Zoom’s growth has continued, although it has faced a barrage of criticism from cybersecurity experts and users about bugs in the codes and the lack of end-to-end encryption of its chat sessions. https://bit.ly/2x47sEY It has appointed former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos and a number of other experts to address these concerns and security researchers say it has responded strongly to the issues.
Investigators say ‘Zoombombing’ incidents, in which uninvited guests cause crash meetings, were caused by simple choices made by some of the app’s millions of new users and that the company has taken sensible steps, including giving hosts the ability to lock meetings and limit the number of visitors can do. However, for corporate customers, the issue of encryption and who is keeping track of data or listening to calls is more important, whether it’s protecting valuable business information or meeting customer privacy obligations.
Lea Kissner, formerly a world leader in privacy technology at Google, and now a security advisor to Zoom, said the 256-bit GCM encryption introduced with Zoom 5.0 next week was in line with what others in the industry were using. All Zoom customers will switch to the new cryptographic mode from May 30, Kissner said.
To criticize the fact that the company had routed certain data through Chinese servers, Zoom also said that an account administrator can now choose data center regions during meetings.
