When any major disruption or change to daily life occurs, it doesn’t take long for bad actors to catch up. With the recent increase of people telecommuting, Zoom has become a target platform for individuals to abuse. Zoom-bombing is when uninvited meeting guests share screens, audio, or chat messages that are disturbing and often graphic. These gate-crashers typically utilize publicly available Zoom links and Personal Meeting rooms that are visible to the public for easy sharing. This article provides some suggestions on setting changes and best practices you can employ to keep from falling victim. The links in this article will take you to either Auburn knowledge articles or Zoom support articles that provide additional instructions, and all of the links have been checked and are safe to use. 

Keep Zoom Updated

One of the most important steps you can take for your security is to ensure your Zoom application is up-to-date. Auburn has provided instructions for updating your devices and turning on automatic updates where available.

Manage Participants

Regardless of the size and breadth of your meeting, you can enable settings that help you control who might participate.

• Only allow authenticated users to join: If someone tries to join your meeting from a forwarded message, or without logging in for any reason, they will receive a message prompting them to either sign in or leave the meeting. They will not be able to participate anonymously. By default, this setting limits your meeting to Auburn Users, but you can extend it to others as needed. 
  
  
• Require a password: As an added level of security, you can generate a unique password to accompany your meeting. You can send that out with the meeting invitation or send the password separately, ultimately creating your own two-factor authentication.
  
  
• Mute or remove participants: When participants are disruptive, the host has the ability to mute their audio and turn off their video. Or, if the participants shouldn’t be there in the first place, the host has the ability to remove them.
  
  
• Disable chat: If the meeting participants are distracted by off-topic conversations or sidebars, the host has the option to disable the in-meeting chat. You can also disable the Private Chat function so participants can’t have separate conversations via Zoom during the meeting.
  
  
• Turn off file transfer: If you want meeting participants to be able to chat but don’t want them sharing gifs or memes, hosts have the option to turn off file transfer which will keep the chat conversation purely text-based.
  
  
• Put an attendee on hold: While we’re all getting used to Zoom, there are a lot of options to keep track of. If you’re trying to decide if you want to mute or remove someone or take some other action, consider putting that attendee on Hold. This will temporarily disconnect audio and video for that participant until you can determine the best course of action for the remainder of the call.
  
  
• Lock the meeting: If all participants have joined, you can lock the meeting to prevent any other attendees from joining for any reason.

Enable a Waiting Room

Once you’ve determined who will be attending your meeting, you can add another layer of safety by implementing a Waiting Room prior to the start of your meeting. This is essentially a staging area that allows users to know they’re in the right place and that they will be connected on time, but it also gives the host a chance to monitor who is joining. As of a recent update, this is a default setting when you create a Zoom meeting, but it can be adjusted as needed. Click here for instructions on enabling a waiting room for newly created or previously scheduled meetings. 

Manage Screen Sharing

Last, but by no means least, you should adjust your meeting’s screen-sharing settings. Best practices suggest that screen sharing should be limited to the host, and a recent Zoom update made that the default setting when creating meetings. If you you have existing meetings scheduled, you may need to go in and change that setting manually. Click here for instructions on changing your screen sharing settings.