‘Very serious incidents’ have forced suspension from online schools as conferencing app faces renewed questions over security

This article is more than 5 months old

This article is more than 5 months old

Singapore has suspended the use of video-conferencing tool Zoom by teachers after “very serious incidents” in the first week of a coronavirus lockdown that has seen schools move to home-based learning.

One incident involved obscene images appearing on screens and male strangers making lewd comments during the streaming of a geography lesson with teenage girls, media reports said.

The death toll around the world from the coronavirus has surged past 100,000 and there are nearly 1,700,000 cases.

Worried about Zoom's privacy problems? A guide to your video-conferencing options Read more

The worst-hit country is the United States, where there are now 500,000 cases and a death toll of almost 19,000.

However, Donald Trump said on Friday that he would be assembling a special council to consider when it might be safe to begin lifting widespread curbs on daily life across the US in order to get the economy moving again.

The president described it as the “biggest decision” he has ever faced in his life and would be drawing on business and medical expertise to help him reach his verdict

The lockdown imposed in many countries around the world – Argentina and Turkey both extended their measures on Friday night, for example – has seen millions of business shuttered and sustained by teleconferencing.

Zoom’s video technology has proved very popular during the shutdown but it has faced safety and privacy concerns over its conferencing app, with the Singapore schools decision following on from concerns about security when the app was used by British cabinet ministers.

“These are very serious incidents,” Aaron Loh of Singapore’s education ministry technology division said on Friday, without giving details.

“The ministry of education is currently investigating both breaches and will lodge a police report if warranted.

“As a precautionary measure, our teachers will suspend their use of Zoom until these security issues are ironed out.”

Loh said they ministry would further advise teachers on security protocols, such as requiring secure log-ins and not sharing the meeting link beyond the students in the class.

Zoom was deeply upset to hear about the incidents and was “committed to providing educators with the tools and resources they need on a safe and secure platform”, the firm’s chief marketing officer, Janine Pelosi, said in an email.

It has also recently changed settings for education users to enable virtual waiting rooms and ensure that only hosts can share their screens by default, she added.

Singapore’s decision came as Apple and Google said they would collaborate to use smartphone technology to help trace and contain the spread of the virus. They will open up their mobile operating systems to allow for the creation of advanced “contact-tracing” apps.

Another type of technology is being planned in South Korea where the government said it will strap tracking wristbands on people who defy quarantine orders.

Officials said stricter controls are required because some of the 57,000 people who are under orders to stay home have slipped out by leaving behind smartphones with tracking apps. Plans for broader use of wristbands were scaled back after objections by human rights and legal activists.

Other key developments around the world included:

Wuhan, where the coronavirus outbreak started, recorded no new cases in the week that it opened its doors again after 76 days sealed off from the world. Overall, China reported 46 new coronavirus cases on Friday, of which 42 were imported from abroad.

David Malpass, president of the World Bank, said he was confident of progress on his joint call with the International Monetary Fund for a temporary standstill in official bilateral debt payments by the world’s poorest countries. Malpass said the proposal would be discussed next week by finance officials of both the G7 and G20 groups of leading economies.

The G20’s energy ministers appeared to have failed to broker an agreement on oil production in a virtual meeting hosted by Saudi Arabia on Friday. They released a statement saying the G20 would do it all it could to bring stability to the world energy market but did not say if oil producers such as Saudi, Russia and Mexico had been able to agree on cutting output to lift prices.

Britons have been urged to stay at home over the Easter weekend and resist the temptation to go on daytrips as temperatures are expected to climb to 26C in some places. Health secretary Matt Hancock said it would be a “test of resolve”.

More than 100 Australian and New Zealand passengers from the Antarctic cruise ship Greg Mortimer have started disembarking at the port of Montevideo in Uruguay to board a medically-equipped Airbus to Melbourne early on Saturday morning.

Taiwan and Germany have already curbed use of Zoom, while Google banned the desktop version from corporate laptops this week. The company also faces a class-action lawsuit.

Concerns have grown over its lack of end-to-end encryption of meeting sessions, routing of traffic through China and “zoombombing”, when uninvited guests crash meetings.

Officials at Berkeley high school in California said they suspended use of the app after a “naked adult male using racial slurs” intruded on what the school said was a password-protected meeting on Zoom, in a letter to parents seen by Reuters.

To address security concerns, Zoom has launched a 90-day plan to bolster privacy and security issues, and has also tapped former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos as an adviser. The Singapore government has also been using the tool to host media conferences.