Unwelcome guests unleash racist, pornographic barrage

The Conejo Valley school board’s first attempt at holding a public meeting via videoconferencing went horribly wrong Tuesday, ending before it even began.

As district staff was preparing to start the 6 p.m. meeting, which was hosted on the Zoom app to comply with coronavirus-related social distancing directives, one or more unidentified persons took over the online group chat, a practice known as “Zoombombing,” and began saying the N-word repeatedly. Among those logged in at the time: the board’s teenage student rep, who is African American.

As participants, who patched in via video, reacted with shock, the hackers took over the meeting’s center screen and began sharing hardcore pornographic images, including people having sexual intercourse and close-ups of male genitalia.

The person or persons, at least one who could be heard laughing loudly, also showed Nazi images, including a flag with a swastika. They threatened school board members, saying that if they could hack into a Zoom meeting, they could find the trustees’ home addresses.

The online trolls went as far as telling board members to kill themselves and threatening to hurt members of their families.

Roughly a minute into the verbal and pictorial tirade, district staff managed to end the online broadcast. On the live feed of the meeting posted on the district website, staff posted a message notifying the public of “technical difficulties.”

Trustee Cindy Goldberg told the Acorn that police had been notified and that the meeting would be rescheduled for a later date.

New method

CVUSD posted the log-in information for the March 24 Zoom meeting along with the agenda on March 20, so it was available to any member of the public. The meeting was originally scheduled to take place March 17 but was postponed following the district’s COVID-19 closures.

So-called “Zoombombing” has become increasingly rampant in recent weeks as the online platform has soared in popularity since millions of citizens around the globe have been ordered to stay home. While the program has become the go-to choice for many online educators, its screening-sharing feature can easily be taken over by troublemakers unless users take precautions, according to tech website Tech Crunch.

Kicking ill-intentioned individuals out of meetings can be ineffective because they can simply log in with the same meeting ID number under a different name. Some classes at USC today reported their Zoom virtual classrooms being interrupted by outsiders logging in and using the N-word.

To deter Zoombombing, Tech Crunch says, meeting hosts have to change the platform’s default administrative settings and disable the screen-sharing option for anyone but the host. Meeting administrators/hosts generally have the ability to mute participants.

At the time of the incident, the meeting had not yet begun and only around 12 onlookers had joined the video chat.

Local school board watchers who were following the meeting on Twitter reacted with horror and dismay.

“That’s beyond disgusting,” one Twitter user replied.

“I really hope they can find out who did that,” another user said.

“I am beyond livid,” one person replied.

Others reacted on Twitter by sharing details on how to block future online attacks, including disabling screen sharing, disabling file sharing to avoid spreading viruses and disabling the setting that allows removed participants to rejoin so troublemakers can’t reenter a meeting.

A Newbury Park High School teacher expressed concern that Zoom is a platform many educators are using to teach classes remotely while schools are closed.

“Is it that easy to hack Zoom? Many teachers are now using or plan to use this technology. Maybe we should rethink?” he said.

Teachers union representative Jake Anderson said the Unified Association of Conejo Teachers “will be rolling out a training to warn teachers about this type of behavior and ways to prevent it from happening.”

Reacting to the Acorn’s tweets about the meeting, Zoom responded through its official Twitter account that it takes the security of Zoom meetings “incredibly seriously” and encouraged those involved to report the incident to its security team.

Zoom also shared a blog with tips on how to avoid letting outsiders “crash” Zoom meetings.