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posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 13 2020, @06:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-a-great-choice dept.

Zoom admits data got routed through China - Business Insider:

In a statement late Friday, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan admitted to mistakenly routing calls via China.

"In our urgency to come to the aid of people around the world during this unprecedented pandemic, we added server capacity and deployed it quickly — starting in China, where the outbreak began," Yuan said. "In that process, we failed to fully implement our usual geo-fencing best practices. As a result, it is possible certain meetings were allowed to connect to systems in China, where they should not have been able to connect."

He did not say how many users were affected.

During spells of heavy traffic, the video-conferencing service shifts traffic to the nearest data center with the largest available capacity – but Zoom's data centers in China aren't supposed to be used to reroute non-Chinese users' calls.

This is largely due to privacy concerns: China does not enforce strict data privacy laws and could conceivably demand that Zoom decrypt the contents of encrypted calls.

Separately, researchers at the University of Toronto also found  Zoom's encryption used keys issued via servers in China, even when call participants were outside of China.

[...] Zoom has faced multiple high-profile security issues in recent weeks as it struggles to cope with an unprecedented surge in traffic and new users.

Zoom did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment and clarification.

Previously:

 
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Monday April 13 2020, @01:18PM (5 children)

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 13 2020, @01:18PM (#981941) Homepage Journal

    Those seriously concerned with security would be running teleconferencing software on their own servers.

    -- hendrik

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 13 2020, @04:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 13 2020, @04:55PM (#982074)

    ha!

    I wish that were true, but I know too many techies who believe the promises of big companies. If they say "end to end encrypted" you'll get a lot of people trusting it. The number of people who have repeated the claim of long passwords taking exponentially longer to decrypt is staggering. They don't realize the number of ways crypto can be compromised.

    I'm sure you're correct for certain instances like a meeting where actual data/specs are being discussed, but corporate espionage can involve a lot of mundane type of information that a manager might not think is a big deal.

  • (Score: 2) by legont on Monday April 13 2020, @04:59PM (3 children)

    by legont (4179) on Monday April 13 2020, @04:59PM (#982075)

    My employer which is a large bank and very much concerned is using Zoom simply because nothing else currently reliably works - our own net is overloaded as is and we need our bandwidth to provide service to the customers - you.

    --
    "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 13 2020, @07:27PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 13 2020, @07:27PM (#982168)

      "service"

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2020, @01:08AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2020, @01:08AM (#982325)

      Why are businesses freaking out about needing to see people on a video conference? What's wrong with the good old fashioned telephone conference with slides sent out beforehand? There is even software to share computer screens for remote presentations where you don't need to turn on any cameras. Why is everyone running to Zoom (especially even when other solutions existed before anyone heard of them last year)? Is this just simple social media herd mentality?

    • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday April 14 2020, @02:56AM

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 14 2020, @02:56AM (#982381) Homepage Journal

      I was going to suggest jitsi, which s free software that will run on your own server (and which I haven't tried yet myself), but ... if your net connexion is overloaded, I see your point.

      I presume you have some way of using zoom without a net connexion?

      -- hendrik