Events South Australia webinar bombarded with porn and “horrible” voices
An Events South Australia webinar was the unfortunate victim of a disturbing “Zoombombing” last week when hijackers bombarded attendees with pornographic images.
The vulgar disruption forced organisers to cut the webinar short and reschedule when they realised they could not regain control of the meeting, according to a spokesperson from the South Australia Tourism Commission (SATC).
Dbusiness Events owner Deb Budich told The Advertiser that the disruption took place about 20 minutes into the webinar.
“Everyone was really engaged and everything was really happening,” she said.
“Unfortunately (the hackers) were particularly nasty and there was pornographic stuff coming up.
“Then there was voices and they started saying not very nice things… saying some pretty horrible things.”
The webinar, which had about 230 attendees, was facilitated by EventsSA to guide the industry on their forward planning for hosting COVID-safe events in the state.
“Unfortunately, the webinar, hosted on a public forum, was accessed by a third party clearly intent on disrupting the session,” the SATC spokesperson told Travel Weekly.
“As soon as we realised the disruption could not be managed, we ended the webinar.”
The hackers were partaking in a practice known as Zoombombing, derived from photobombing, except instead of intruding on someone’s photo opportunity, Zoombombers spam video calls and meetings with pranks or obscene content.
The Zoombombers were able to join the meeting as it’s login code was publically promoted.
EventsSA held another webinar earlier this afternoon on another video conferencing platform to make up for the blunder.
Featured image source: iStock/Deagreez
Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au
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