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Comment by notechback | Hacker News Reader

So they paid $1000 for 530k accounts. What's the use case of a stolen zoom account? To impersonate an institution this doesn't seem quite enough, so is it just lulz?

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Having 530k unique accounts on any growing platform seems like a great investment even if it's not clear how to utilize them right now. Whatever someone could ever want to do with a bot army, they now have 530k fewer accounts to create. Mass-creating accounts will only get more difficult as Zoom's platform matures. There are plenty of ways utilize bot accounts for indirect financial gain on platforms like Reddit and Twitter.

In theory maybe it could be used for industrial espionage if certain stars aligned.

Espionage - apparently there are entire darknet channels for trading insider information (presumably for trading purposes). Nefarious actors could easily tap into a pre-earnings call Zoom meeting and extract valuable information.

I was in a Zoom call today where someone joined half way through and immediately was very loud and vulgar for about 5-10s before he was kicked.

So n = 1 it's for lulz.

If those accounts belong to an org with SSO enabled and mediocre security, that’s a win for the crooks.

Huh? It's not like Zoom offers an SSO solution. The value of the accounts is two-fold:

1) Looking for Zoom premium accounts, there is actually a pretty good trade in stolen accounts on the dark web. Folks will pay a dollar for example for one of these accounts.

2) This is the more likely one—looking for people who use one shared password across multiple valuable logins.

SSO is offered at the "Business" plan level. So I guess the question would be how many of the stolen accounts were for users at a lower plan level but were also controlled by espionage-worthy companies.

You can authenticate with Zoom using your existing SSO solution, not the other way around. When using SSO the Zoom account wouldn't have a password at all.

Exactly. I'm surprised there are accounts from large companies that must have some sort of SSO with MFA solution. Are they not using it with Zoom? That's a no brainer

>2) This is the more likely one—looking for people who use one shared password across multiple valuable logins.

This is my point.

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