Putnam Zoom meeting interrupted by racial slurs and porn videos
Putnam — Local officials are reexamining live-stream protocols for public meetings after the Board of Selectmen and Mayor fell victim to a racist and pornographic 'Zoombombing' attack Monday night.
Roughly eight hackers hijacked the Zoom portion of Monday night's selectmen's meeting, causing 50 seconds of confusion and chaos as they spewed racial slurs, played pornographic videos and blared loud music.
The vulgar episode finally ended when the board voted to go into recess and shut down the Zoom.
Town Administrator Elaine Sistare said the incident was reported to local police, who have opened an investigation and notified the FBI. Sistare said the perpetrators could be charged with a cybercrime, breach of peace or multiple offenses.
'Once we get more information from our IT people and the police, we'll bring it to the selectmen and see if they want to address this issue in regards to … any safeguards we can put in effect to prevent this in the near future,' Mayor Barney Seney said.
This kind of attack, known as Zoombombing, spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic when bad actors began exploiting technology in new ways as the world moved online, according to the Bureau. The offenders, who either work alone or coordinate group attacks on virtual forums, search the web for public Zoom links to disrupt video conferences, municipal meetings and virtual classrooms with pornography, hate speech and threats.
Sistare said the town started live-streaming meetings on Zoom during the pandemic. After the pandemic ended, the Board of Selectmen continued the practice to make meetings more accessible for the community. Aside from one instance years ago where an individual displayed images of guns, Sistare said this is the first time the town has experienced this kind of attack.
'It's a valuable tool,' Sistare said. '(It's) unfortunate that it can be abused, but but our goal is ultimately to make it easy and accessible for our (community) members, our town of Putnam taxpayers and others to legitimately join in our government meetings.'
Sistare said meeting links are posted publicly on the town's website. While virtual attendees first enter a virtual waiting room before a moderator individually admits them into the Zoom meeting, Sistare said the town does not check names to verify the identities of participants.
Sistare said the selectmen could decide to modify the town's Zoom settings to automatically disable the audio, video and screen-sharing abilities of participants. Audience members could request for the moderator to unlock the controls using the virtual hand-raising function.
'I think everything will be on the table,' Sistare said. 'We've got some measures that have been in place all along — we may tighten up the measures even more — but it's up to the Board of Selectmen and mayor to have a discussion about the potential changes altogether. … It is an unfortunate episode but we'll try to learn and improve from it.'
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