US Fed Reserve Zoom Conference Canceled After ‘Porn-Bombing’

A Federal Reserve Zoom event with more than 220 people was canceled Thursday after a user hijacked proceedings and displayed pornographic content, Reuters reports(Opens in a new window).

The hijack left Fed Governor Christopher Waller unable to deliver his opening remarks because graphic images from a call participant named “Dan” began to pop up on the screen.

In a statement to Reuters, Brent Tjarks, executive director of the Mid-Size Bank Coalition of America (MBCA), which hosted the Zoom event, said: “We were a victim of a teleconference or Zoom hijacking and we are trying to understand what we need to do going forward to prevent this from ever happening again. It is an incident we deeply regret. We have had various programs and this is something that we have never had happen to us.” 

Tjarks adds that he suspects a security switch for the Zoom event that would have muted users and prevented them from sharing their screens was incorrectly set, though he could not confirm.

The MBCA, whose roughly 100 members include banks with between $10 billion and $100 billion in assets, made the decision to cancel the event minutes after it was scheduled to commence, citing “technical difficulties.” Waller was scheduled to speak on inflation and the economic-outlook into 2023, in addition to a question-and-answer session with members of the MBCA. 

A Zoom spokesman told Reuters it “strongly condemns such behavior.”

These so-called Zoom-bombings became somewhat of a scourge in 2020 as events shifted to video calls during the pandemic. It prompted the Justice Department to warn Zoom-bombers it would charge them with a crime if they hijacked a meeting with malicious intent. Zoom, and later Google, eventually rolled out features intended to prevent these unwanted takeovers.

If your meetings are being interrupted by unexpected visitors or inappropriate material, check out our guide on How to Prevent Zoom-Bombing.