Country Stops Using Zoom for Classes After 'Serious Incident'

Singapore has suspended the use of Zoom for online education after hackers hijacked a lesson and showed obscene images to students. In what is known as "Zoombombing," two hackers interrupted a geography lesson a day after Singapore closed schools on Wednesday and moved lessons online as part of partial lockdown measures to curb local transmissions of COVID-19, the AP reports. Singapore’s Ministry of Education said it was investigating the "serious incidents" and may file police reports. "We are already working with Zoom to enhance its security settings and make these security measures clear and easy to follow,” said Aaron Loh, director of the ministry’s Educational Technology Division.

"As a precautionary measure, our teachers will suspend their use of Zoom until these security issues are ironed out," Loh said. The mother of a 13-year-old girl says her daughter told her the two hackers, both Caucasian men, showed the class pictures of penises and told the teenage girls to "show us your boobs," the Straits Times reports. Singapore is not the only country affected by the teleconferencing disruptions. The FBI issued a public warning on March 30 advising users to avoid making Zoom meetings public after it received multiple reports of teleconferences and online classrooms being hijacked, with hackers displaying hate messages or shouting profanities. (More Singapore stories.)