Zoom Meeting Safety

By now, we've all heard about Zoombombing, or, heaven forbid, we've experienced it. Zoombombing occurs when someone forces their way into Zoom meetings and proceeds to behave in an inappropriate fashion. Zoom has rolled out a lot of new features to help combat this practice, but what exactly are they and how can the average user implement them? We'll be covering several of these features in this blog post, as well as including tutorial sheets that will walk users through each step of enabling higher security settings. 

• Zoom Waiting Rooms. Zoom waiting rooms are your first line of defense again uninvited, unwanted Zoom attendees. By setting your meeting up with a waiting room, it gives you, the host, the ability to control who can join the meeting and when. After your meeting has begun, you can even send people back to the waiting room, in case someone manages to get through your security. To learn how to set up a waiting room, check out our Zoom Security tutorial. Once you have enabled the waiting room, follow our tutorial for how to add it to scheduled meetings.
• Don't use your personal Zoom ID for public-facing meetings. If you've been using Zoom for awhile, you may have set up a Zoom "vanity" URL. This make your URL easy to remember and is handy for sharing. You may also use your personal meeting ID, which is 10 digit code. If you're having a meeting with just your students or coworkers, using these options is usually just fine. If you're having a public-facing meeting, however, schedule a new meeting with a random meeting code. This makes it more difficult for someone to guess your new meeting ID and helps prevent "bombers."
• Control screen-sharing. Sharing your screen is a great tool in Zoom. It can let students see what you're doing on your computer and makes it easy to share content. But do you want all of your students or potential bombers to be able to share their screens as well? Quite possibly not. You can easily toggle the ability to share screens on or off; the instructions for this are included in our Zoom Security tutorial.
• Turn off private chat. Private chat can be useful during long meetings to let participants communicate between each other without having to include the whole group in their chat. This is also, however, potentially distracting and, worse, a great way for Zoom-bombers to wreak havoc.
• Know how to remove participants if you need to. If for some reason an incredibly dedicated Zoombomber manages to get through all of your security steps thus far, you will need to be able to remove that user. 

There are some very dedicated Zoom-bombers out there. These steps won't necessarily block all of them, but they will deter the majority. Zoom is frequently releasing new security features; we'll keep you posted on them as they develop!