Zoom buys Keybase – First acquisition in 9 years

May 7, 2020: The New York security start-up Keybase, is acquired by Zoom. This is the first acquisition in the nine years history of the company.

April 1, Zoom announced to fix the security claws within the application as they were not ready for such a high number of users in a short period. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan mentioned that they would fix the issue in the application and providing the highest security with encrypted conversation within the application. 

When Keybase will be implemented, the person who schedules the meeting in the application will have an option to choose it to be encrypted. This will disable the cloud-based recording of the chat. The encryption will not be on the zoom server, the user should be aware that there shall not be any access to these data.

Early April, Eric hired former Facebook CTO to the team as a consultant to help the company apologizing to the users about the Privacy and security aspect. Eric also addressed saying if you look at the technical aspect then Keybase has the best technical team and the best technology with them which will help to overcome the problem which Zoom is facing in the current scenario. 

The Keybase service will be available only for the paid offerings in the Zoom platform not for the free service. This will allow the meeting initiator to control who enters the meeting room and, whoever enters manually has to enter the password. 

Also, Eric did mention as the Keybase team is expert and security with the encrypted process to secure the data this will help Zoom to overcome all of these failures they had in the past. The 90 days will end with a complete encrypted platform for the zoom users.