Videoconferencing is a tool that businesses utilize to discuss corporate plans as well as judicial, military, healthcare, or other issues. For a business, its staff, clients, and customers, the theft of that data may be fatal.

At its Ignite 2022 conference, Microsoft released a number of new Teams chat and meeting capabilities. The major news is that Microsoft intends to revamp Microsoft Teams to enhance the current channel experience.

When dealing with the Teams desktop client in some crucial situations, Microsoft has considerably decreased latency for Windows and Mac users.

Civicom, a New York City-based company that provides audio, online videoconferencing, and market analysis services, has been discovered to be giving its customers access to a goldmine of personal and sensitive data. 

Civicom excels in virtual meetings over the internet, and the files contain audio and video recordings of private customer sessions. Unfortunately, the S3 bucket was left open to the public with no password or security verification, allowing everyone with knowledge on how to discover damaged databases to access the data.

It was caused by a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket, rather than attackers intentionally hacking into the system, as is usual of this type of data breach. There were four different datasets exposed as listed below:

Countless hours of video and audio recordings, as well as hundreds of written transcripts, reveal Civicom's clients' private chats. Several businesses are likely to have discussed the following topics during these discussions: 

It is worth noting that a number of client companies have employees whose personal information is visible on the bucket. Employees of Civicom clients' PII which have been exposed include complete names and photos of the faces and bodies of staff. At the time of the event, the bucket was active and being updated, and it had been active since February 2018. The management of Civicom's bucket is not Amazon's responsibility, therefore this data leak is not Amazon's fault. 

Civicom exposed 8 gigabytes of records containing more than 100,000 files, according to the Website Planet Security Team, which discovered the database. This was due to one of Civicom's unencrypted Amazon S3 buckets. The AWS S3 bucket has been active since 2018, according to the Website Planet Security Team. 

On October 28th, 2021, the researchers discovered the vulnerability and notified Civicom of the situation on October 30th, 2021.  After three months, Civicom replied to Website Planet and retrieved the bucket on January 26th, 2022. Nonetheless, the good news is, the bucket is not accessible to the general public.

Video Conferencing is the one tool that makes work from home achievable and hassle free and with systems like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet the work from home scenario has settled quite comfortably. But with increasing users and demand, competition among these softwares has become cut-throat. Though Zoom is dominating the market currently, Google meet has announced two new features to be integrated from October 8th.

With there being no apparent end in view of the pandemic, everyone has been forced to live within a confined space and spend their days not doing anything that needs going out.

Especially students all over the world are having a hard time managing things without the actual physical classes to dote on. Not that online lectures and a virtual education aren’t lucrative but most students find a lack of motivation a common problem.

With the dearth of options, available students are managing to adjust to the online learning life given most institutions have switched to various online mediums like Zoom, which is a great step, globally.

Universities are trying their best to make do with all the possible resources they have at their disposal. But is it okay to consider that online classes shall suffice?

What the students need at such a gloomy time is a way to make education and learning which could provide them technologically rich experience and not just a mere imitation of what otherwise happens in their classes.

The tech-world is overflowing with contemporary ideas of learning. There are hundreds of ways to create and design interactive sessions via podcasts, and virtual reality. Students, from the comfort of their homes, could be better learners if they encourage the right way and could induce better responses.

Online learning or online lectures shouldn’t just be a professor, going on and on for hours like in a physical class. There is such a variety of avenues to follow when it comes to technology-based learning that too, online.


During the past months, the number of students enrolled in online courses has increased substantially. There has also been a rise in the number of students joining full-time online courses.

People who weren’t as tech-savvy as all that lost their jobs and had to get back to studying for any possible chances of a career change.

Per sources, FutureLearn and UofPeople(University of People) have experienced a hike in demand for online courses because of people wanting to be productive in the days of quarantine by acquiring new skills.

According to reports, there has been seen a significant rise in the demand for online courses for the English language, health-related subjects, and mental health topics.

This culture of interactive online learning if does not limit itself to the pandemic times could lead to a better learning mechanism that would prove to be extremely efficacious for students all across the globe.

The availability of online platforms for students to begin or continue their education is massively contributing to lessening the number of chances of students deferring.

Even though the initial online courses that went and probably still do, by the name Moocs (Massive open online courses) weren’t so much of a big hit, but given the times of the “pandemic induced confinement”, people are warming up to them.

The current predicament has everyone bursting with uncertainty. There is no telling if universities would even begin their next sessions any time soon.

Everything can’t certainly be taught online, especially practical-learning which prompts a huge question mark to which no one has the right answer.

Realizing that there is no way to know when the universities would open and commence their normal operations with the added factor of social distancing, ‘the internet is all we have.'

Amid this Covid-19 lockdown, the use of video conferencing software has seen a rapid rise- be it work-related, teaching or just socializing. Our use of video chats has increased and with it, the security concerns have risen diligently.


One such software "Zoom", which is quite popular for video conferencing has been drawing attention from security researchers and journalists recently over privacy and security issues. Even United States investigative agency FBI issued a warning to the citizens to be cautious while using zoom app citing cases of zoombombing where calls were interrupted by "pornographic and/or hate images and threatening language," and the agency also asked the software companies to practice "due diligence and caution" in their security measures.

 Zoombombing is an incident when your video conference calls are interrupted by unwanted/uninvited attendee and disrupts the meet. 

Measures by Zoom to prevent Zoombombing

On Wednesday, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan published a blog post addressing these security concerns. He mentioned that Zoom will freeze feature updates and focus on coming up with security solutions for the next 90 days. Quoting to dedicate these ninety days to "the resources needed to better identify, address and fix issues proactively." He wrote that these initiatives will focus on "conducting a comprehensive review with third-party experts and representative users to understand and ensure the security of all of our new consumer use cases," according to the post.

Steps you can take to prevent "Zoombombing" 

There are some simple settings you can change on your Zoom app for your calls from being interrupted by unwanted individuals.

1. Don't use your personal meeting ID, instead use a pre-meeting ID exclusive for that meeting. There are Zoom tutorials to help you understand how to generate a random meeting ID for a meeting. 
2.  Enable the "waiting room" feature in Account Management. It will allow you to see who is attempting to join the meeting and give them access. 
3. Once the meeting begins and everyone is in it, lock the meeting to outsiders. 
4.  Make sure you don't publish or post the meeting ID on public platforms. 
5.  If any outsider does barge in- 

You can lock them out by going to Participants List in the navigation sidebar, scroll to more and click to Lock Meeting. You can also shut them up, by clicking on Mute all control in the Participants List.