Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet are no longer. Google LLC has rebranded the enterprise chat and meeting services in G Suite as Google Chat and Google Meet, amid surging use of them during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Strangely, Google did not actually announce the name change, instead publishing a blog post that explained Meet’s security and privacy credentials. Confirming the name change, the Google Hangouts support page has also been updated to Google Meet Help.

The rebrand isn’t universal as yet. A search for Google Meet still results in Hangout Meets results with links for the app without the new branding.

In any case, the service has boomed in popularity during the coronavirus pandemic. Google noted that use of Google Meet is up 25 times compared to January.

On the security side, Google Meet is said to employ an array of counter-abuse protections to keep meetings safe.

“Google Meet makes it difficult to programmatically brute force meeting IDs (this is when a malicious individual attempts to guess the ID of a meeting and make an unauthorized attempt to join it) by using codes that are 10 characters long, with 25 characters in the set,” Google said. “We limit the ability of external participants to join a meeting more than 15 minutes in advance, reducing the window in which a brute force attack can even be attempted. External participants cannot join meetings unless they’re on the calendar invite or have been invited by in-domain participants. Otherwise, they must request to join the meeting, and their request must be accepted by a member of the host organization.”

New features being rolled out include the ability for only meeting creators and calendar owners to mute or remove participants, a restricted ability to approved requests from external participants and a restriction on meeting participants from rejoining meetings after final participants have left.

The post by Google comes amid widespread attention to security issues with online teleconferencing services. Zoom Video Communications Inc., which has become the most popular app during the pandemic has been targeted with revelations about security issues. Zoom said April 8 that it had formed an advisory council to address its security issues.

Image: Google