Zoom’s video conferencing app user base grew another 50% to 300 million in the past three weeks as the company fought to quell a backlash around security and safety, banning a number of governments and companies from its applications.
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. Zoom stocks closed close to 5% in New York, and at $ 150.25 are now back close to peaks close to $ 160 last month before the security row broke out.
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.
That adds to a list that also includes many schools around the world, Elon Musk & # 39; s company SpaceX, Asia-based Standard Chartered bank, and governments in Germany, Taiwan and Singapore. 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, with Zoom already reporting a 2,000% increase in user numbers last month compared to the best days of last year.
It said on Wednesday that growth had continued for the past three weeks, bringing the number of users to 300 million daily, even though it received a torrent of criticism from cybersecurity experts and users about bugs in the code and lack of end-to-end -end encryption of his chat sessions. https://bit.ly/2x47sEY Zoom has appointed former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos and a number of other experts to address these concerns, and security researchers say they have 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.
(This story has not been edited by staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
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