The Central Government has said that the ZOOM video conferencing app is not safe for official meetings. The Cyber Coordination Centre (CyCord), under the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), has issued an advisory on secure use of ZOOM Meeting Platform by private individuals. This advisory states that the platform is not for use by Government officers/officials for official purposes.
About CyCord: Cyber Coordination Centre (CyCord) portal was launched by Prime Minister of India on December 22, 2018 at DGPs/IGPs Conference as a one-stop platform for sharing all cyber related matters amongst Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), government organizations and other stakeholders.Primary objective of the Cyber Coordination Centre is to provide a platform to the Law Enforcement Agencies and other stakeholders to collaborate and coordinate their efforts to resolve cyber crime, and for other cyber related issues like sharing case studies/research findings, experience sharing, formulation of research problems, finding solutions to complex cyber issues, etc. Cyber Coordination Centre is an effective platform to deal with cyber issues.
The document makes reference to earlier advisories of the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team(Cert-In) and states that Zoom is not a safe platform. The guidelines have been issued to safeguard private individuals who would still like to use the platform for private purposes.
Cert-In: CERT-In or the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team is an office within the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. It is operational since January 2004. The constituency of CERT-In is the Indian Cyber Community. CERT-In is the national nodal agency for responding to computer security.
The broad objective of this advisory is to prevent any unauthorized entry into a Zoom Conference Room and prevent the unauthorized participant to carry out malicious attacks on the terminals of other users in the conference.
It is being said that the servers of Zoom, like TikTok, are mostly located in China. Several other countries have also expressed concern about the security of the application. Germany, Singapore and Taiwan have already banned the application.
ZOOM APP: Eric Yuan, born in China’s Shandong province, is the founder of video conferencing app Zoom. He moved to US, where he founded the Zoom app in 2011. Eric Yuan built a $35 billion video conferencing empire in nine years.
