Hacker sabotages PAJ public forum
Published:Thursday | February 24, 2022 | 12:05 AM
President of the Press Association of Jamaica (PAJ), George Davis, is adamant that its planned public virtual forum will still be held as part of the activities to observe Journalism Week 2021 following its postponement Monday night because of disruptions by a hacker.
Following two disruptions during a presentation, the organisers advised participants to leave the meeting and rejoin.
However, soon after, disturbing images were broadcast, showing rats being killed and someone using a pair of women’s heels to harm a cat, along with more lewd messages.
“It came to a point where we realised that notwithstanding the efforts we had made to moderate the persons who were being admitted to the Zoom session, that clearly the undesirable, the interloper was using software to circumvent the controls that Zoom provides on the kind of plan that we have,” Davis told The Gleaner Monday night.
“No matter how we tried to mute the account that the messages were coming from, no matter what we did we couldn’t mute it. We couldn’t stop them from sharing screen. Usually you need permission from the host to share screen but our control in that regard was overridden and it just got way out of hand.”
He added: “Obviously, there was some software they were using that enabled them to circumvent all of the management controls and functions that we had. So we had to apologise to the meeting and end it.”
At an emergency meeting of the PAJ executive immediately afterwards, it was decided that the forum would go ahead on Friday with the full participation of the public as planned.
However, much tighter controls will be put in place to ensure that there is no recurrence of Monday night’s incident.
“There is no way that we are not having the forum this year,” Davis vowed.