NJ School's Zoom Meeting Hacked With Porn, Racist Images: Reports

LUMBERTON, NJ — A Burlington County School District’s recent Zoom meeting was hijacked by hackers who reportedly posted pornographic images and racist language.

The Lumberton Public School District has suspended the use of Zoom while it and the local police department investigate whether the service will be safe for their students to use, the Courier Post reports.

They hacked into a session being used by the Lumberton Middle School for about 15 seconds before a teacher and a co-host monitoring the session took it down, according to nj.com.

While not using Zoom, the district will continue to use Walther Learning Portal and Google Classroom, according to NJ 101.5

Incidents such as this have become widespread, according to the FBI. “Zoom Bombing” is when a conference is disrupted by pornographic and/or hate images and threatening language. Incidents were also reported in schools in Massachusetts.

The FBI recommends the following tips to prevent hacking of Zoom meetings:

• Do not make meetings or classrooms public. In Zoom, there are two options to make a meeting private: require a meeting password or use the waiting room feature and control the admittance of guests.
• Do not share a link to a teleconference or classroom on an unrestricted publicly available social media post. Provide the link directly to specific people.
• Manage screensharing options. In Zoom, change screensharing to “Host Only.”
• Ensure users are using the updated version of remote access/meeting applications. In January 2020, Zoom updated their software. In their security update, the teleconference software provider added passwords by default for meetings and disabled the ability to randomly scan for meetings to join.
• Lastly, ensure that your organization’s telework policy or guide addresses requirements for physical and information security.

Anyone who has been the victim of a teleconference hijacking or any cyber-crime should report it to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov. Anyone who receives a specific threat during a teleconference should report it to us at tips.fbi.gov or call the FBI Boston Division at 857-386-2000.