When I was young there was a saying that the old folks in my home town used frequently. ‘An idle mind is the devil’s workshop.’ The motivation behind it was to encourage people to find useful ways to spend their time rather than just sitting around twiddling their thumbs.
There’ve always been those, though, who would much rather use their time to cause harm to others. The Internet caused them to proliferate. The black-hat hackers who take over your email and send messages to everyone in your address book, often asking them to do something that enables the hacker to take over their account. Then, there are the people who like to photo bomb. That’s the jerk who jumps into the frame and makes faces when you’re taking pictures. A childish thing to do, but a lot of people still do it.
Then, along the COVID-19 pandemic. More people than one can imagine had more time on their hands than they knew what to do with. Those of us who still had work commitments, spent a lot of time online, and thanks to applications like Zoom, we found ourselves in more meetings, more often than before because of the administrative and logistical ease with which a Zoom (or other online meeting platform) can be organized.
As you might imagine, this new technology spawned yet another type of miscreant, the Zoom-bomber. These are people who hack into Zoom meetings, take them over and then bombard the attendees with offensive, often pornographic images and sounds.
In August 2020, for example, during a panel discussion hosted by the National Associations of Black Journalists and Hispanic Journalists, a Zoom bomber took control of the session and flooded the attendees’ screens with pornography and a veritable deluge of obscenities. The bomber was eventually evicted and the event continued, but some of the participants were traumatized by the experience.
In other incidents in 2020, hijackers have taken over teacher’s sessions, divulging their personal information, displayed inappropriate images during classroom sessions, and there were over 200 reports to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2020 of people disrupting Zoom sessions by broadcasting videos showing sexual abuse of minors. While hacking is a serious enough crime, those involving abuse of children are especially heinous and are undoubtedly the work of not only idle, but evil minds.
While I hadn’t personally experienced such things at the time I spoke to the individual who described the 2020 incident, just a few days later, while I was participating in an international Zoom conference arranged by a friend of mine in Zimbabwe, the conference was hijacked by an individual who proceeded to inundate us for over twenty minutes with irritating sounds, pornographic videos, and a torrent of obscene, racist, and just annoying speech and messages in the chat box.
The hijacker was ejected after twenty minutes and the conference proceeded, but I could tell that the incident had affected everyone, because I felt discomfited and confused, wondering not only how, but why would this individual be motivated to do such a thing. Like my journalist -friend and his colleagues nearly four years ago, I felt helpless—for a few minutes. Then I began to think. There is always something that can be done. Tech companies, legislators and law enforcement need to find ways to discourage such actions, ways to forestall or prevent them.
In the meantime, there are a few things we as individuals can do to make it harder for these miscreants to cause trouble. Requiring a password to join a Zoom session is one and using the waiting room feature, which requires the host to physically admit an individual will help. Setting the screen sharing option to ‘Host Only’ can prevent sharing of inappropriate images, and limiting distribution of meeting links can make it harder for bombers to find your event.
Other than that, as one individual who was interviewed about this problem said, “It’s an unfortunate fact of life that we have to live with.” Forgiving words, but it’s truly sad that someone would ever have to utter them. | NWI
