How to Protect Your Zoom Meeting

Protecting Your Zoom Meetings As of December 2019, Zoom was hosting 10 million daily users. That number has now surged to 200 million. But even Zoom itself admits that the rapid growth in user numbers has exposed vulnerabilities, including Zoom Bombing.

“Zoom Bombing” is when people not invited to the meeting join, usually with malicious intent. In all cases this has been associated with the meeting host choosing to use a Personal Meeting ID instead of the “Generate Automatically by Zoom.” Using the “Personal Meeting ID” basically opens one continuous meeting, attributed to you as host, and drastically increases the potential of being “Bombed.” Learn about meeting IDs and how to generate a random meeting ID. There are a number of steps you can take to protect your meetings, starting with familiarizing yourself with Zoom’s settings and features. Some of these include:  Lock the meeting: It’s always smart to lock your front door, even when you’re inside the house.

When you lock a Zoom Meeting that’s already started, no new participants can join, even if they have the meeting ID and password (you should use a password for all Zoom meetings). In the meeting, click “Participants” at the bottom of your Zoom window. In the Participants pop-up, click the button that says “Lock Meeting.”  Disable video: Hosts can turn someone’s video off. This will allow hosts to block unwanted, distracting, or inappropriate gestures on video or for that time your friend’s inside pocket is the star of the show.  Mute participants: Hosts can mute/unmute individual participants or all of them at once, which can help block unwanted, distracting, or inappropriate noise from other participants. You can also enable “Mute Upon Entry” in your settings to keep the clamor at-bay in large meetings.  Turn off file transfer: In-meeting file transfer allows people to share files through the in-meeting chat. Toggle this off to keep the chat from getting bombarded with unsolicited pics, GIFs, memes, and other content.  Turn off annotation: You and your attendees can doodle and mark up content together using annotations during screen share. You can disable the annotation feature in your Zoom settings to prevent people from writing all over the screens.

Keep Up to Date One of the important steps you can take is to make sure you keep any installed version of Zoom (mobile or desktop) up-to-date. If you receive an alert while using Zoom that there is an update available, run the update. Use these instructions to help you update your Zoom platform.

Use Passwords and Never Share Your Meeting ID Zoom bombing relies on meetings not being password protected. Do not post the Zoom meeting number online, without any protection and always require a password when scheduling new meetings or activating instant meetings. Be sure to disable the option “embed password in meeting link for oneclick join” and enable “require password for participants joining by phone.”

Share the Password Securely

Don’t put the password on the public internet and never share IDs, passwords, or pictures of your Zoom meetings publicly.

Use Waiting Rooms Using Zoom waiting rooms allows the host to screen everyone entering the meeting to ensure only invited guests can enter. Meeting hosts can customize Waiting Room settings for additional control and you can even personalize the message people see when they arrive at the Waiting Room so that they know they are in the right spot.

Manage participants As the host of a Zoom meeting, you should manage the meeting participants by controlling the camera and mute options, setting the screen to “host only” and disable file transfer. To prevent participants from screen sharing during a call, use the host controls at the bottom to click the arrow next to “Share Screen” and then select “Advanced Sharing Options.”

Under “Who can share?” choose “Only Host” and close the window. You can also lock the Screen Share by default for all your meetings in your web settings.

Beware of Phishing As usual, always be careful when clicking on any meeting invite links. If you are ever suspicious, copy the meeting ID from the link provided, log into the official Zoom platform and enter the meeting ID directly to join the meeting.