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COLUMN/CYBERSECURITY
5 THINGS YOU CAN DO TODAY TO MAKE ZOOMING SAFER Paul Ducklin, principal research scientist, Sophos discusses how to make your experience with Zoom safer
SMARTSMB / April 2020
Work still means meetings, and meetings still mean people. But with the coronavirus pandemic having caused many countries to define a “group” as a maximum of two people, and prohibiting people from meeting up face-to-face anyway, even with friends and family, then meeting with people means an online meeting. For very many of us, that means Zoom, not least because many of us were using Zoom already, and happily, and… …or so we thought, safely.
But Zoom has had a bunch of security scares recently, as huge numbers of new users flock to it, and as crooks and miscreants try to take advantage of that. Fortunately, a lot of the problems and risks people are having can be reduced enormously just by getting the basics right. Unfortunately, a lot of the habits that existing Zoom users have fallen into need to change. Insecure shortcuts – ways of using Zoom that the old-timers have inadvertently been teaching to the Zoom newcomers – didn’t seem to matter that much before, but they do now. So here are our top 5 “things to get right first” – they shouldn’t take you long, and they are easy to do.
1. Patch early, patch often Zoom’s own CEO just wrote a blog post announcing a “feature freeze” in
