A new, and disgusting trend has reared its ugly head: Zoombombing. Zoombombing is when an online troll enters a Zoom video conferencing meeting with the intent to disrupt, disgust, and damage the occupants and derail the meeting’s purpose or mission.
It’s become an increasingly popular activity with misanthropes everywhere as more and more people use Zoom’s service for work and at-home education during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Zoombombers pray on three key things:
- The Zoom app’s lax security practices right out of the box
- People’s lack of familiarity with the Zoom app’s settings
- A general lack of common sense across the board when it comes to sharing sensitive information
How do you stop a Zoombombing?
There are a few ways you can protect yourself from a Zoombombing. Here they are:
- Password protect your meetings – Make sure that all of your meetings use a password. You can do that via this link (https://zoom.us/profile/setting). Zoom will even prompt you to password protect your meeting when you’re setting it up. Take advantage of that.
- Don’t announce your Meetings/Meeting IDs/Participant List via Social Media – Stick to more secure means of message sharing like email, or WhatsApp. It’s far too easy to over-share information online.
- Check your participant’s list/Learn who should be there and who shouldn’t be – If you’re the organizer or somebody the organizer trusts, carefully go over your attendance list and look for people that shouldn’t be there. It’s very easy to boot a user from a Zoom meeting.
- Be picky when it comes to screen sharing – Zoom makes it very easy to share your screen or give up control of a meeting. You should disable this setting right from the start if you don’t plan on using it. Close this avenue of exploitation before you even begin.
- Don’t allow users to join your meeting before the “Host” arrives – Simply put, don’t let the meeting start before you, the organizer, gets there.
- Enable the waiting room option – Let attendees wait in the Zoom waiting room and approve them one by one. If you’ve got an attendance list you’ll know who should be there and who shouldn’t be. This setting allows you to perform some level of crowd control from the start.
- Lock your meetings – After you start your meeting you can lock it up entirely. This will stop people from sneaking in after you get going. You can use this feature by clicking “Manage Participants” and selecting the appropriate setting the options that appear on the right-hand side.
As of April 5th, Zoom has enabled many of these features by default for all new meetings and all previously scheduled (but not started) meetings.
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