Zoom today announced Zoom 5.0, a major new update for the company’s video calling app that will be rolling out later this week. The new update is part of Zoom’s 90-day plan to address the recent security and privacy-related concerns on its platform.

Zoom 5.0 introduces a number of much-needed fixes to the app, addressing some of the critical security concerns. First up, Zoom is soon going to start using a much more secure encryption standard.

Zoom calls, as you may remember, were found not be end-to-end encrypted as the company had advertised. It obviously faced a lot of criticism because of that, but the company is now going to use AES 256-bit GCM encryption for all its calls, this includes Zoom Meeting, Video Webinar, and Phone data.

Zoom 5.0 also gives admins the option to choose which data center regions are used for meetings and webinars.

There are a number of other new features in the Zoom client, including a new security icon which makes it easier to access all the security-related settings. The update also allows hosts to report a user directly to Zoom, and for education customers, screen sharing now defaults to the host only. Most of these changes are to protect against the trend of Zoombombing.

Tagged with Security, Zoom