From “Zoom Bombing” to Yahoo Finance “Company of the Year”—Cappos weighs in on how Zoom went from zero to hero

In a classic case of “It’s not where you start, it’s where you finish,” Yahoo Finance named Zoom its “Company of the Year” for 2020. The year began for the company with a number of high profile incidents where meetings and classrooms were interrupted in what came to be called “Zoom Bombing.” But the company’s quick and public response to the security flaws these attacks revealed, and the imposition of a 90-day pause on feature upgrades to focus only on fixing security problems, was key to the platform’s incredible growth.

Dr. Justin Cappos, an associate professor of computer and science engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, pointed out that it was the company’s willingness to attack the problems so rapidly, as well as the fixes themselves, that made a difference in the company’s fate. “They made positive changes in the way they protect data,” he stated, adding that “As these issues come up and become more prevalent” the company “worked to try to address them, which is also good.”

Read the full article, which appeared on December 8, 2020, here.