Context: Recently, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has issued an advisory that Zoom video conference is not a safe platform.
Key Points

• Zoom has seen an exponential rise in usage in India as office-goers remain at home due to the lockdown, imposed to curb the Covid-19 pandemic.
• Over 90,000 schools across 20 countries have started using it regularly.
• The maximum number of daily meeting participants of approximately 10 million at the end of December 2019 grew to more than 200 million daily meeting participants in March.
• It has been used extensively by everyone including the central and state ministers for official purposes and conducting meetings.
• The Cyber Coordination Centre of the MHA issued a set of guidelines for its safe usage.
• The Ministry asked the users to set strong passwords and enable waiting room feature so that call managers could have a better control over the participants.
• Users are warned against sharing links on public platforms.
• However, the MHA noted that it was not for use by government offices and officials.

Advisory by the Ministry to avoid constraint as follows

• The users are suggested to set strong passwords and enable “waiting room” features so that call managers could have better control over the participants.
• Users should also avoid using personal meeting ID to host events and instead use randomly generated meeting IDs for each event.
• People using the app should not share meeting links on public platforms.

However in response, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan apologised for the the company failing to fully implement its usual geo-fencing best practices, while assuring customers that there was no impact on Zoom for Government Cloud, a separate cloud service for government customers.

About its Formation

• Zoom is a US-based video communication and videoconferencing platform.
• This Silicon Valley-based company appears to own three companies in China through which at least 700 employees were paid to develop Zoom’s software.
• This arrangement is apparently an effort at labor arbitrage in which Zoom can avoid paying US wages while selling to US customers, thus increasing their profit margin.
• However, this arrangement may make Zoom responsive to pressure from Chinese authorities.
• Reportedly, few calls made through the app are routed through servers in China.

Advisory by CERT-In 

• The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) had also issued two advisories cautioning on the use of Zoom for office meetings.
• It cautioned that insecure usage of the platform may allow cybercriminals to access sensitive information such as meeting details and conversations.
• It said that multiple vulnerabilities had been reported in the video conferencing platform which could allow an attacker to gain elevated privileges or obtain sensitive information.

About Computer Emergency Response Team-India

• It is an organisation of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India, with the objective of securing Indian cyberspace.
• It is the nodal agency which deals with cybersecurity threats like hacking and phishing.
• It collects, analyses and disseminates information on cyber incidents, and also issues alerts on cybersecurity incidents.
• CERT-IN provides Incident Prevention and Response Services as well as Security Quality Management Services.