Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 NFL Draft will be done virtually in order to protect players and personnel. Videoconferencing giant Zoom has been being used by coaches and players to conduct virtual meetings and conferences, but what’s the concern level of the actual Draft potentially being at risk for a security breach?
While the possibility exists, University of South Carolina professor and network security expert Chin-Tser Huang discussed measures that teams will need to take to ensure the integrity of the proceedings.
“Every participant of the meeting will need to be aware of such risks so that they will be more careful,” Huang said. “They have to choose sufficiently secured passwords instead of easy ones. Secondly, perhaps Zoom is not a trustworthy platform for conducting meetings that will involve commercial secrets. I think some American companies such as Google Meetings or Microsoft Teams would be better choices.”
“Basically, we know that communication over Zoom — both the video conferencing and also the chatting — will be recorded,” Huang said. “That’s usually for later access. But when the videoconferencing is ongoing, we of course want to have it encrypted for the confidentiality, and the encryption for Zoom is based on the AES encryption. That means that every participant of this meeting, they all use the same key for encryption.”
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“Zoom has many servers that are used to generate this key, and some of their key generation servers are located in China,” he continued. “So because of this, the Chinese government, according to the law, they get a copy to the key, and according to the Chinese encryption law, any foreign company … if they are conducting some kind of encryption they need to get permission and approval from the Chinese government. If they get a copy of the key, all communication theoretically could be accessed by Chinese agents.”
Zoom has previously been sued for allegedly selling user information to Facebook, so what is the possibility of someone trying to acquire the full unedited zoom call of another team?
“If an account of some legitimate participant who is invited to join a draft meeting and that account has been compromised, a hacker could watch or record what is going on in real time,” Huang said.
Meanwhile, Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh expressed his concern about using the platform Zoom.
“Yeah, big concern,” Harbaugh said. “Every time I read something in, like, the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times that talks about how messed up Zoom is, or some of these other deals … I immediately text it to our IT people, and [director of football administration] Nick Matteo’s one of those guys, and they assure me that we are doing everything humanly possible.”
– – Quotes via Jordan Dajanni of CBS Sports Link – –
