Hackers are posting verified Zoom accounts on the dark web

Zoom is under scrutiny after quarantines workers’ virtual conferences were hacked. Yahoo Finance's Tech Editor Dan Howley breaks down the latest.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: You're watching Yahoo Finance Live. I'm Julie Hyman. We've been talking in recent days about the explosion in use of services like Zoom but with that have comes some concerns about privacy on Zoom. And New York City schools are just announcing that they're no longer going to be conducting their remote learning over Zoom. Dan Howley has been tracking this for us. Indeed, my kid's teacher this morning said, we're going to be finding another platform by next week. What's the concern with Zoom, first of all?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, the concern with Zoom is really that when it's out of the box, it doesn't really offer the kind of protections that you would expect a service like this to offer. It doesn't make them immediately available to consumers. Not that they're not available, but you have to go into the Settings menu to really set up your video chats so that they're private and protected. For instance, you can add a password, but that's something you have to do in the Settings menu. You can enable a kind of lobby area where people can join the chat but before they actually get in and converse with people, you can vet them. So it really is not an unsecured platform so much as it doesn't provide the ability to secure it as easily as one would expect.

Now, there have been other issues, though, with Zoom that do make it a little kind of shady, as far as the different capabilities that it has offered. For instance, at one point, it was providing user information to Facebook, and Zoom had said that that was a result of Facebook having integration where you could sign in using Facebook. They disabled that, so that's no longer an issue. But security researchers have been kind of combing through this as of late and finding issues here and there.

There were two zero-day attacks that were found through the service. Zero-day basically means they were just found. The company had no idea that they were there, and they had to get on fixing them right away. They are doing that.

I think, though, for the general public, this is still a secure app, as long as you use those security features, such as a password and that lobby feature. But if you're not interested in that, you can use something like Skype, something like Microsoft team, something like Google Hangouts, Whatsapp video chat. A lot of those are end-to-end encrypted, something that Zoom is not.

JULIE HYMAN: All right, Dan Howley, thank you very much for walking us through that. Zoom shares, by the way, are down in today's session in what is otherwise an up day for Wall Street. The S&P 500 up 5.6% right now, as is the Dow, the NASDAQ up 5.5%. Keep it right here on Yahoo Finance Live. We will keep you posted.