Calls with saved contacts the only solution to Zoom Bombing
In the digital space, someone may argue that Zoom is the biggest beneficiary of the coronavirus pandemic. The no-cost, almost no limit to number of attendants to a conference call, and ability to call anyone whether or not they are in your Zoom contact list (I still do not know how to add anyone to my Zoom contacts), made it possible for Zoom to gain popularity over Skype, Hangout, WhatsApp, Facebook, Microsoft TEAMS and any other video conferencing application that was available pre-coronavirus pandemic.
The ability to call those not on Zoom contact list turned out to be Zoom’s weakest feature, a feature that allowed hijacking of Zoom calls that later become dubbed Zoom Bombing.
Zoom Bombing affected family, business and education Zoom calls where strangers bombed into Zoom meetings, forcing a lot of the calls to be terminated prematurely. Zoom bombing became such a big deal whereby on April 23rd Zoom rolled out an update that was thought could once and for cure the menace. But did it?
The rolled out upgrade saw Zoom require Zoom call initiators to create a call ID and accompanying password. With that in place, only participants with the ID and password for a Zoom meeting could attend the meeting, but that seems not to have solved the underlying problem, as the question of sharing the IDs and passwords securely is yet to be resolved. Take for example this high level KAA meeting that has found its way to the general public:
A week has not passed since I came across another Zoom ID and password for a family conference call over at Facebook. It goes without saying that implementation of passwords and IDs for Zoom meetings is not working to totally eliminate Zoom bombing, and this is because once a group password is generated, one cannot be sure that at least one of the group members will not leak the password to the public – even if it means doing so just for the fun of it.
What Zoom ought to implement therefore is the requirement that everyone who is to attend a Zoom meeting must be in the contact list of the person initiating the call – just as it is the case for Skype, WhatsApp, Hangout, Facebook and all the other platforms that offer VoIP and video conferencing solutions. Check this VoIP provider https://www.ringcentral.com/voip-caller.html that might be the best solution for you
If Zoom is afraid that such an implementation would slow down its growth, then a compromise would be to allow users to create Zoom IDs without having to supply third party IDs like emails or phone numbers. That is, within Zoom itself, one should be able to create a Zoom ID that he can then share with fellow zoomers, and it is only that way that Zoom users can be sure no one can zoom bomb their conferences.
