A look at the rise of “Zoombombing”, where trolls disrupt public Zoom conferencing calls by using the service's screen-sharing feature to share graphic content
Zoom has become the default social platform for millions of people looking to connect with friends, family …
New York TimesTaylor Lorenz
Context & Ripple Effects
Zoom became the default social platform for millions almost overnight, and the same openness that made adoption frictionless made public calls easy targets: trolls join uninvited and use the screen-sharing feature to push graphic content onto screens of friends, families, and classrooms. What began as opportunistic hijacking quickly organized — coverage of [[a:952241|thousands coordinating Zoombombing campaigns through private chats, message boards, and social platforms]] shows this became a movement, not a spate of pranks.
First-order effects
Hosts running open public meetings — schools, community groups, families — bear the immediate cost: disrupted sessions and exposure to graphic content on a tool they chose for convenience.
Zoom's permissive defaults around screen sharing and meeting access turn from a growth feature into a liability that the company must answer for publicly.
Second-order effects
Zoom is pushed into shipping defensive tooling rather than relying on host vigilance — its later At-Risk Meeting Notifier, which scans the web for posted meeting links and alerts organizers, is the direct product response to this attack pattern.
Institutions adopt lockdown behavior — waiting rooms, disabled screen sharing, restricted links — trading the platform's signature ease-of-use for safety, which erodes the differentiation that won Zoom its user base.
Third-order effects
Research showing most incidents in high schools and colleges originate with participants themselves posting links publicly means no purely technical fix closes the gap — video conferencing is converging on enterprise-style access control as a baseline expectation for all users.
If the pattern holds, security posture becomes the competitive axis in mass-market video conferencing, with regulators and institutions treating meeting integrity as an access-control problem akin to account security.
The trend: Consumer-scale video conferencing is being forced to retrofit enterprise-grade access controls, as the openness that drove viral adoption becomes the primary attack surface.
Using Zoom to host a community call (like @hunterwalk and @CaseyNewton's @wfhappyhour?). It's great but unfortunately it can be abused by bad actors - so here's how to make sure you keep control over it well! Starting on the Main Settings page at https://zoom.us/...
The surprise Quarantech hit? Houseparty is now #1 in a bunch of countries. Downloads are up 592X in Spain vs last month! https://techcrunch.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Public Zoom meetings? Make these changes: - Disable “Join Before Host” - Enabling “Co-Host” so others help moderate. - Disable “File Transfer” - Disable “Allow Removed Participants to Rejoin” so booted attendees can't slip back in. https://techcrunch.com/... https://twitter.com/.…
Hey @zoom_us we ❤️ Zoom! But please address this issue of Zoom Bombing! Now that millions of kids will be going virtual we need to make sure we protect then from being exposed to these attacks. It happened to my colleagues and I and it was awful! https://techcrunch.com/... @LeahB…
Anonymous Zoom accounts zoombombing public zoom events. This will end, as most platforms will, as gatherings for verified true name zoom accounts only. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Hey @zoom_us perhaps https://www.nytimes.com/... this problem would go away faster if this feature were able to be set at the schedule a meeting settings page. Also, would really help us education folks right now. We have plenty else to do than fight this https://twitter.com/...
On Tuesday, Chipotle was forced to end a public Zoom chat that the brand had co-hosted with the musician Lauv after one participant began broadcasting pornography to hundreds of attendees https://www.nytimes.com/...
@thekenyeung @Jessicalessin @CaseyNewton @hunterwalk I flagged the issue to Zoom's CEO but instead of changing anything they just put out a PSA like “Yep, here are our dangerous defaults” https://twitter.com/...
@JoshConstine @thekenyeung @Jessicalessin @CaseyNewton tbh, i sympathize w them - they've seen a massive spike in an unintended use case (publicly-shared zooms) by first time hosts. And probably are all hands on deck just keeping the core product working. I'm sure they'll figure …
Our video call was just attacked by someone who kept sharing pornography + switching between different user accounts so we could not block them. Stay tuned for next steps. And I am sorry to everyone who experienced. We shut down as soon as we could.
The trolls of the internet are under quarantine, too, and they're looking for Zooms to disrupt. I wrote about the rash of Zoombombing that's been happening this week https://www.nytimes.com/...
Now that Zoom has become a consumer facing social platform they'll have to deal with more moderation and content control issues like this https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Savage. Someone just bombed @CaseyNewton's WFH Happy Hour Zoom call with screenshares of the Internet's most disgusting videos, and the only fix was to kill the call. https://twitter.com/...
Beware of trolls sabotaging your zoom session. If you are hosting a video call, change your settings before you start! Thx @verenanz for this share! @OpenLibraryON @eCampusOntario @avanbarn @NeuroscienceUT @greeneterry @IrenequStewart @NurseKillam https://techcrunch.com/...
Can't wait for curious Times readers to fire up Google this weekend to find more info on this shock video. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Happy to see the term Zoombombing I coined become a global PSA thanks to @TaylorLorenz. Protect yourself until Zoom fixes its defaults https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Default settings matter. (this also seems like an abuse problem that's trivially east to fix with a UI/UX tweak — Zoom can simply change the default settings for screensharing) https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@sarahkunst @Jessicalessin @karaswisher Yeah that was similar to what happened to us last week and I wrote about how to stop. Zoom's settings need to adapt to its newfound public use cases and subsequent risks https://techcrunch.com/...
Another day, another twist. Kids and schools using Zoom should be aware. The images are predictably horrific. @StevenLevy says they'd shock an 8chan regular. https://techcrunch.com/...