Last year wasn’t exactly short of threats facing humanity, but “Zoombombing” was an especially 2020 kind of disruption, one that sought to hijack one of the most prominent means of communication by which people stayed in touch with everyone from co-workers to friends and family during lockdown.
Zoombombing, for those unfamiliar with it, works like this: An unwanted participant or participants access a Zoom call without being invited, against the wishes of the participants, and cause problems. One Massachusetts-based high school’s Zoom session was hijacked by an individual who screamed profanities and then shouted the teacher’s home address. On social media, some users reported that their Zoom session had been taken over and used to show pornographic content.