School board Zoom meeting hacked

Hackers disrupted the Grand Coulee Dam School District’s board meeting Monday night as “trolls” who logged onto the Zoom meeting.

Superintendent Paul Turner, along with the district’s board of directors, held the meeting in the school library while others attended via ZOOM. 

While Board Director Carla Marconi, who is leaving her position, was saying thank you to those who had just honored her at the meeting, a person logged on with the name “Taylor Duffy” and began playing a clip on a loop from the rap song “Wishing Well” by artist Juice WRLD.

Another person logged on with the name “John,” who showed a violent clip, presumably from a movie, played repeatedly on a loop of a woman screaming, then getting shot in the head.

Then another person logged on with audio of a voice saying offensive things.

The Zoom meeting was then stopped.

Hosts of Zoom meetings can choose to let people “unmute” themselves in order to speak during a meeting, or to have them need permission to speak first.

When the meeting resumed, the option to let people unmute themselves was turned off, and the meeting wasn’t interrupted anymore.

Jarred-Michael Erickson, a member of the Colville Business Council, attending the Zoom meeting, encouraged the school district to have their information technology department look into the hacking incident.

He expressed worry for the same thing happening while students were on a Zoom meeting for school.

Turner told The Star on Tuesday that he did speak with the IT department 

and was told that when a Zoom meeting is held in an “open session,” allowing people to simply log onto the meeting, there isn’t much you can do about it.

Turner said they are likely going to start hosting the meeting with a “waiting room,” in which the hosts of the meeting will manually let people into the meeting.

“I need to know who you are before I can let you in,” Turner said.

One issue that could come from this is when people have unfamiliar names or screen names that Turner or other staff members wouldn’t recognize.