Zoom has been facing a lot of criticism since March because of its inefficient privacy policies. One disastrous consequence of using Zoom for video calls is Zoombombing, a method that hackers employ to infiltrate meetings and bombard users with improper content.

A horrible incident of Zoombombing occurred in a San Francisco Church as a hacker was able to breach one of the bible studies with porn. The Church is now suing Zoom for this because the tech company has continuously failed to provide a secure system. The Saint Pauls Lutheran Church is one of the oldest churches in San Francisco and it was conducting a bible study class for its senior citizens on May 6th when the unfortunate incident took place.

Source: Zoom
Forty-two minutes into the lecture, the screens were “hijacked” and the users found their “control buttons disabled” as pornographic videos were played during the study. A federal lawsuit against Zoom was filed on Wednesday by the Church and its administrator.

The lawsuit said, “The footages were sick and sickening — portraying adults engaging in sexual acts with each other and performing sexual acts on infants and children, in addition to physically abusing them.” The Church claims that the hacker is a “known serial offender” and has been reported, “multiple times to the authorities.”

The Church is looking for compensation for Zoom’s negligence as the tech company is “prioritizing profit and revenue over data protection and user security.”

Source: USA Today

“The Church filed this lawsuit only after Zoom refused to take its concerns seriously,” Mark Molumphy, one of the church’s lawyers, told CNN in an email statement.

“One would think that Zoom — having been informed of the Church’s horrific experience — would’ve done everything possible to acknowledge and fix the security vulnerabilities of its platform,” Molumphy, a partner at Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy One, said. “Instead, the Church was basically ignored, and Zoom likely hoped that the Church would just go away. However, it is not going away, and instead, courageously stepping up to try to change Zoom’s practices and make sure this doesn’t happen again to anyone else.”

Zoom, on the other hand, has denied all such claims by the Church. A spokesperson for the company wrote an email to CNN saying, “We were deeply upset to hear about this incident, and our hearts go out to those impacted by this horrific event. Words cannot express how strongly we condemn such behavior.”

“On the same day we learned of this incident, we identified the offender, took action to block their access to the platform, and reported them to the relevant authorities. We encourage users to report any incidents of this kind either to Zoom so we can take appropriate action or directly to law enforcement authorities. We also encourage all meeting hosts to take advantage of Zoom’s recently updated security features and follow other best practices, including making sure not to broadly share meeting IDs and passwords online, as appeared to be the case here,” the spokesperson added.

Previously, the FBI warned schools around the Massachusetts district to stay alert of the Zoombombing incidents after two institutions in the region were attacked. However, the company has not taken any significant action since then.