Child porn displayed in DC Charter School Board virtual meeting

DC Public Charter School Board meeting hacked

Hundreds of people on a virtual meeting of the DC Public Charter School Board last night were exposed to child pornography when someone broke into the meeting and started playing the illegal video.

WASHINGTON (FOX 5 DC) - A video depicting child pornography was briefly broadcast during a Monday night meeting of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, a recent example of what law enforcement have called "Zoom bombing." The existence of the illegal and lewd video was first reported by the Washington Post.

Two people who attended the virtual meeting hosted on Zoom tell FOX 5 the video played for several minutes around 7:30 p.m. Monday before someone could end the meeting. Nearly 100 people were on the call.

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The charter school board typically hosts its monthly meetings in person, but the coronavirus pandemic has led them to move to Zoom.

The meeting was open to the public and not password protected, according to instructions on how to attend the meeting posted to the board's website.

One source told FOX 5 several children were on the call with their parents when the pornography played.

DCPCSB alerted D.C. Police and the FBI, who are investigating.

Cybersafety expert Reginald Corbitt recommends password protecting your meeting and changing the security settings within Zoom or a similar app to control who can share their screen or broadcast to the meeting.

"It's new to a lot of people. You have people who are just jumping on Zoom and just going right in without changing the default settings. So things like that will cause situations to happen like last night," Corbitt said.

In a statement, DCPCSB said, “We’ve reported the incident to the FBI and MPD, and for that reason we cannot comment further, except to say we have consulted with Zoom and will use new safeguards to ensure this does not reoccur.”

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Zoom told FOX 5 the following:

"We have been deeply upset to hear about these types of incidents. Zoom strongly condemns such behavior and recently updated several features to help our users more easily protect their meetings. For all users, we have made the Zoom Meeting ID less visible to help prevent unintended sharing, and we have added a new Security icon to the Zoom meeting controls for all hosts to help them quickly access in-meeting security features, including the ability to remove participants and lock meetings, among other actions. Through our offering of training, tutorials and webinars, including our CEO Eric Yuan's weekly privacy and security webinar, Zoom is continuing to engage with all of our users on how they can best use Zoom and protect their meetings. We encourage users to report any incidents of this kind either to Zoom so we can take appropriate action or directly to law enforcement authorities."