Due to a dramatic increase in the number of people 'working from home', ChildHub has experienced a major increase in traffic. We recently held our first webinars for more than 200 participants, in Croatian and in English. Unfortunately, our webinar on stateless children was 'zoombombed' by people hoping to sabotage the event.
ChildHub is taking this attack very seriously, and we want to share the actions we have taken:
- We have reported the incident to Zoom and are discussing which jurisdiction of police to notify.
- We have reported the incident in-house with Terre des hommes, and special experts are helping us take further steps
- We have offered psychological counselling to the speakers due to the stress they have experienced.
Furthermore, we would like to assure you that our webinars are still secure. We are aware of the many security concerns that have been raised against Zoom and are following these closely. Zoom has started to take these on, and is improving its product and the data protection of its users.
Our webinars are delivered to the wider public — anyone can join, no company secrets are shared and the recordings are uploaded to our youtube channel. To protect our webinar experience, we will proceed with the following changes, although we are sad to limit the interaction level of our events:
- Neither us nor our partners will be allowerd to share the Zoom link directly on Facebook. We will only advertise through ChildHub, which means that participants must first register on ChildHub to access to the link.
- We will follow ZOOM security changes, and you will need a password to access the webinars.
- Our facilitators will not allow people in the waiting room into the webinar room if they suspect malicious intent.
- The option of 'annotation' (drawing) has been disabled to prevent misuse.
- Our facilitators will withdraw the chat option for anyone abusing this tool.
- If the webinars are on sensitive topics, at least two facilitators will be at hand to screen out potential disruptors.
All this is to say that for now, we are sticking with the platform Zoom. Other platforms are no more secure, but Zoom has become the platform of choice in recent weeks, and its popularity has brought on its own challenges.