Zoom Bombing: Tips for protecting your Zoom Meetings

Zoom Bombing is a tactic employed by hackers to disrupt Zoom meetings that have been posted publicly or otherwise reach a public audience. The hackers join meetings and disrupt them by taking over Screen Sharing to share explicit images or videos. They may also try to steal data, share malicious files, or direct participants to malicious websites. 

Below are some guidelines to keep your Zoom meetings safe. Depending on your needs, you may not be able to enact all of these recommendations. 

- Never share the meeting link, the meeting ID, or the meeting password on public platforms

- Under settings, disable the option “embed the password in the meeting link for one-click join”

- Under settings, disable the option “enable join before host"

- Under settings, disable “chat” and “private chat”

- Under settings, screen sharing, “who can share”, select “host only”

- When scheduling, disable the personal meeting ID feature. Allow Zoom to create random IDs for each meeting

- When scheduling, require passwords for all meetings in all forms, including phone calls

- When scheduling, consider enabling the waiting room feature which requires the host to check-in participants

- During meeting, prevent renaming by selecting “manage participants”, “more”, uncheck “allow participants to rename"

- During meeting, mute a participant by selecting “manage participants”, “mute” next to the participant in question

- During meeting, to disable a participant’s video, select “manage participants”, “more” next to participant, “stop video”

- During meeting, eject a participant by selecting “manage participants”, “more” next to the participant, “remove”

- For larger meetings, consider adding a co-host who can monitor, admit, unmute, and eject participants as needed 

- Just as with email, beware of malicious files and phishing links distributed through Zoom

Academic computing has put together a comprehensive guide for securing zoom meetings which is available here. https://fairfield.quip.com/wEomAFbK1M73

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out and thank you for your awareness.