A Florida judge was forced to abandon a court hearing after Zoombombers bombarded a video feed with pornography.
Graham Clark, who has pleaded ‘not guilty’ of masterminding the recent blue-tick Twitter hack, was appearing in court yesterday over video-link to request a reduction in the current $725,000 bail bond.
Judge Christopher Nash denied the request, but not before he was forced to take a break after the Zoom call was bombarded with pornography.
Despite evicting the ‘Zoombombers’ during the recess, Judge Nash’s hope for a more civil restart was scuppered by a Pornhub clip broadcast from an uninvited participant, leading to the entire hearing being abandoned.
Although this sounds like a bad reflection on Zoom security, in fact, the court was at fault, arranging the call without the need for participants to enter a PIN.
Clark remains in custody, after being told that he must pay at least 10 percent ($72,500) to be released before the trial.
It’s not known if the ‘added entertainment’ was the result of random Zoombombing, or a targeted attack by sympathisers of Clark, deliberately looking to disrupt the trial.
The irony of a privacy case being scuppered by a lack of correctly applied privacy settings is not lost on us, and let’s face it, there’s nothing quite as good as porn for making any formal event decidedly uncomfortable.
It’s understood that Judge Nash, aware of his mistake, promised reporters that he’d use a PIN code next time.
It’s an extreme, yet gentle reminder that even the most private environments are only as good as the people using them, and one misconfigured setting can open the door to people to eavesdrop on anything you might be up to. Yes. Anything.
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