Zoom has released 5.0 update that is meant to address the privacy and security issues that the platform has been having in recent weeks.
The new update has a security icon that groups together a number of security features. The features include the ability to lock meeting, remove participants, restrict screen sharing and chatting in meetings. The platform is also now enabling passwords by default for most customers and for business users, IT admins can now define password complexity.
The Zoom’s waiting room feature is also now on by default for basic, single-license Pro, and education accounts. This feature allows a host to hold participants in a virtual room before they’re allowed into a meeting.
Zoom is also improving some of its encryption and upgrading to the AES 256-bit GCM encryption standard. This still isn’t the end-to-end encryption that Zoom erroneously said it had implemented, but it’s an improvement for the transmission of meeting data. Business customers can also control which data center regions will handle meeting traffic for their Zoom meetings, after concerns were raised that some meetings were being routed through servers in China.
Many of these changes are a response to Zoombombing whereby pranksters join Zoom calls and broadcast porn and other shocking videos.