The Cambridge City Council had to briefly suspend a meeting after getting ‘Zoombombed’ by porn
“We will work diligently to make sure that never happens again."
The Cambridge City Council reportedly had a number of technical difficulties during their virtually held meeting Monday night.
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Some worse than others.
According to Cambridge Day, the council was forced to suspend the meeting for 16 minutes after being ambushed by people who jeered, yelled insults, and put up an image of men engaged in oral sex roughly 30 minutes into its public comment period, which was being held through the video-conferencing platform Zoom.
“I’m going to call a recess, because there’s some inappropriate visuals coming through that we need to take care of,” Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui said.
Cambridge Day reported that video technicians for the city’s live broadcast service quickly cut away from the screen to the council’s mostly empty chamber, where clerk Anthony Wilson “could be seen leaning suddenly away from his laptop in surprise.”
The Cambridge City Council is hardly the first government body to be subjected to the disruptive practice known as “Zoombombing,” which has risen with the increased use of the software itself, as the coronavirus pandemic forces in-person meetings into the digital world.
As The New York Times reported last month, Zoom’s default setting allows any call participant to share their own screen with the entire group, which has made unwittingly hosted public meetings prime targets for internet trolls. A Google search for “city council zoombombed” yields thousands of news results, from coastal California to rural Maine. The cyberattacks — which frequently use pornography as their weapon of choice — have also targeted public Zoom chats hosted by prominent companies and journalists, as well as schools and churches in Massachusetts.
Zoom has recommended that those hosting large public meetings “change their settings so that only [the hosts] can share their screen” and that private group hosts use the system’s password protections. The company also recently updated its security measures, including a new control allowing hosts to report other users.
Still, it did no good for Cambridge lawmakers and residents watching the meeting Monday night, which was reportedly plagued by other technical issues (i.e. the use — or disuse — of the mute button) in addition to the Zoombombing incident.
“We will work diligently to make sure that never happens again,” Siddiqui said afterward, according to Cambridge Day. “Because none of us want to see that or hear that.”
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