A Hercules woman is speaking out after her book release event was “zoom-bombed” and now, police have launched a hate crime investigation. Gia Vang reports.
A Hercules attorney is speaking out after she says her book release event was “Zoom-bombed” by uninvited people. Now, police have launched a hate crime investigation.
"Zoom-bombing" is when online meetings are disrupted by uninvited people who share inappropriate and offensive content.
Leigh Johnson told NBC Bay Area Monday that she hosted a book release event via Zoom last Thursday. Her new book is called "Building the Case."
“I was so proud cause because so many people were showing up or maybe even more than 100 people came for a book release of a legal book,” she said.
Johnson said that she decided to release her book via Zoom to coincide with the 149th anniversary of a pivotal Supreme Court decision that dealt a blow to government efforts to protect the civil rights of African Americans.
Johnson said the book release event was going well until they got to a guest speaker.
“During his speech, pornography popped up,” she said. “All of a sudden, I lost control of my Zoom. There were words across my screen and down my screen.”
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Johnson added that there were Nazi symbols, confederate flags and some people were even chanting. She added that the words and images were disturbing.
“All I could do was end the meeting,” she said. “I have a lot of abuse in my background. Those images were very, very hard for me, and I was struggling with some of that.”
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Ahmed Banafa, a cybersecurity professor at San Jose State University, said cases like Johnson’s forced the FBI to put out a warning at the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020.
But there have been a few incidents since companies like Zoom have figured out better protections, including a webinar mode, which means only the presenter and whoever they make co-presenters can speak, having a waiting room and getting participants to register ahead of time.
“If you register you get the link that’s going to be another protection for that person and it’s going to give you an idea of how many people are going to actually attend that event,” Banafa said.
It’s all too late for Johnson, who said she has no idea how Zoom has investigated the incident and is only saying in a response to her, where appropriate, it had taken action on the disruptors.
In another message, Zoom said it closed Johnson’s ticket. She’s even asked Hercules police to look into it.
“This book is teaching people how to represent people who have done horrible things,” she said. “And if I could help empathy for those people then, I could have empathy for these people. I don’t want to be hurt by them nor do I want to hurt them.”
Hercules police confirmed to NBC Bay Area on Monday that they were investigating the incident.
Banafa recommends people who are hosting online meetings to check the service agreement for the company, see if they can find something that might force it to check the session and maybe they can determine who is responsible.
A Zoom spokesperson released the following statement on Tuesday:
“We are deeply upset to hear about this incident, and Zoom strongly condemns such behavior. On the rare occasion a disruption occurs, we encourage users to report it both to Zoom and law enforcement authorities so the appropriate action can be taken against offenders. While we don’t share the specifics of an individual investigation, we have been actively engaged in responding to this incident. We have a number of default settings and features to help hosts maintain in-meeting security, including controlling screen sharing, removing and reporting participants, and locking meetings, among other actions."
