Company News Security & Privacy

Update on Zoom's 90-Day Plan to Bolster Key Privacy and Security Initiatives

Zoom has officially formed our CISO Council and Advisory Board and announced that Alex Stamos has joined Zoom as an outside advisor.

Published on April 8, 2020

In this blog

01 Zoom CISO Council and Advisory Board Members - Jumplink to Zoom CISO Council and Advisory Board Members
02 Alex Stamos Joins Zoom as an Advisor - Jumplink to Alex Stamos Joins Zoom as an Advisor
03 Wednesday Webinar - Jumplink to Wednesday Webinar

Eric S. Yuan

CEO

Eric founded Zoom in 2011 to deliver happiness and bring people together in a frictionless video environment. Zoom’s communications platform continues to transform the way global organizations connect, communicate, and collaborate. As the company’s chief executive, Eric led Zoom to one of the highest-performing tech IPOs of 2019.

Business Insider named Eric one of the Most Powerful People in Enterprise Tech in 2017. In 2018, Glassdoor recognized him as the top CEO for large U.S. companies. In 2019, he was recognized in the Bloomberg 50 as a leader changing the game in global business. Time Magazine named Eric its 2020 Businessperson of Year as well as one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2020. He was also named Comparably's Best CEO for Diversity in 2021.

Prior to founding Zoom, Eric was corporate vice president of engineering at Cisco, where he was responsible for Cisco's collaboration software development. Eric was also one of the founding engineers and vice president of engineering at Webex.

Eric is a named inventor on 11 issued and 20 pending patents in real-time collaboration.

As I mentioned in my message on April 1, Zoom has seen tremendous growth and new use cases emerge over the past few weeks, and we are committed to ensuring that the safety, privacy, and security of our platform is worthy of the trust of all of our users -- both new and existing. In that post, I laid out a 90-day plan with steps that we are going to take, and we’ve wasted no time. To that end, I am excited to announce two developments: we have officially formed our CISO Council and Advisory Board, including security leaders from across industries; and Alex Stamos has joined Zoom as an outside advisor to assist with the comprehensive security review of our platform.

Collaboration across the industry is one of the most effective ways to ensure we are implementing security and privacy best practices. I am truly humbled that -- in less than a week after announcing our 90-day plan -- some of the most well-respected CISOs in the world have offered us their time and services. This includes CISOs from HSBC, NTT Data, Procore, and Ellie Mae, among others. The purpose of the CISO Council will be to engage with us in an ongoing dialogue about privacy, security, and technology issues and best practices -- to share ideas, and collaborate. Within our CISO Council, we are establishing an Advisory Board that will include a subset of CISOs who will act as advisors to me personally. This group will enable me to be a more effective and thoughtful leader and will help ensure that privacy and security are at the forefront of everything we do at Zoom. The initial members of our Advisory Board will include security leaders from VMware, Netflix, Uber, Electronic Arts, and others.

One of the important commitments under our 90-day plan is to conduct a comprehensive security review of our platform, and third-party experts will be critical to this effort. To that end, Alex Stamos has joined Zoom as an outside advisor. Alex is a widely respected expert on cybersecurity. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at Stanford’s Freeman-Spogli Institute and a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution. Prior to joining Stanford, Alex served as the Chief Security Officer of Facebook, where he led a team charged with understanding and mitigating information security risks for the company’s 2.5 billion users. Alex is also a contributor to Harvard’s Defending Digital Democracy Project and an advisor to Stanford’s Cybersecurity Policy Program and UC Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. He is also a member of the Aspen Institute’s Cyber Security Task Force, the Bay Area CSO Council, and the Council on Foreign Relations. And, he serves on the advisory board to NATO’s Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. We are thrilled to have Alex on board. He is a fan of our platform and will no doubt help us implement controls and practices that are best-in-class. For some more information on why he has decided to join us, you can read Alex’s post. We are grateful to Alex and our CISO Council members for their vote of confidence in Zoom and their desire to help make us even better. Together, I have no doubt we will make Zoom synonymous with safety and security.

To further our user education efforts, today at 10 a.m. PT, I will host the first of our weekly webinars to provide privacy and security updates to our community. The webinar will also be streamed live on Zoom's YouTube channel. We hope you can join us.