Zoom’s luck with the security of the application could not get any worse as a lot of privacy issues were discovered in the last 4 weeks. However, it turns out that the video conference service is facing another challenge, thanks to the dark web.

A cybersecurity firm, Sixgill recently pointed out a collection of 352 Zoom accounts that have experienced privacy breaches due to the lack of security offered by the application. One user on a popular dark web forum shared the information of each account’s username, password, meeting ID, host key and hostname.

Source: Hack Read

Furthermore, all the accounts revealed were also categorized according to charges which means that many stolen profiles were paying for an expensive Zoom service plan.
“In comments on this post, several attackers thanked the hacker for the post, and one revealed intentions to troll the meetings,” said Dov Lerner, security research lead at Sixgill, in a statement provided to Mashable.

However, online trolling would be the least of the concerns of all the people whose accounts have been compromised. “The accounts could certainly be used to troll the owner of the account or those who are joining the owner’s calls, but these credentials could also be used for corporate or personal eavesdropping, identity theft, and other nefarious actions,” Lerner explained. “There’s a number of ways a malicious actor could use these stolen accounts.”

Source; Mashable

The stolen accounts don’t just belong to common people. In fact, Sixgill reports that researchers discovered that most of the 352 accounts belonged to educational institutions and small businesses. One of the profiles was that of a major US healthcare provider so basically, no one is safe on the application.

Now you might be wondering about the dark web because even though it has existed in the online culture for a long time, many people are not aware of its functions. To put it simply, the dark web consists of websites, forums and other online destinations where you have to use a special web browser called Tor to access the files.
Typing a URL into Google Chrome or Firefox would not be effective as they are not visible to search engines so dark web cannot be viewed through these common browsers.

Source: Fool

The information regarding stolen accounts was released by Sixgill on April 1st and it came at the point when the app was already being criticized by the users for its security issues. Zoom’s popularity has grown a lot during the past few months because of the pandemic but the countless problems that have arisen with it are making people skeptical about using it.

The service can allow employers to monitor the activities of the employees from home and it also provides irrelevant information to Facebook and LinkedIn without notifying the users.

Even though Zoom’s CEO assured that he would find the bugs and solve all the problems related to security, no significant change in the application can be seen so far. If they want to regain the trust of the users, they need to immediately find the attacker that leaked all 352 IDs on the dark web and return the credentials to the respective people.