Preventing Zoom-Bombing

Categories: End Users Howtos Information Instruction

What is Zoom-bombing? Zoom-bombing is a new issue with Zoom meetings where gate crashers will join meetings already in progress to try and disrupt the proceedings by sharing viruses, disturbing pornographic images, and/or violent imagery. Most of the time, this happens when a meeting link is shared through public communication sources such as social media, but it can also happen by the perpetrators randomly selecting numbers to join Zoom meetings and landing in yours.

Reminders on Using Zoom When Hosting Public Meetings

Avoid posting meeting links and Meeting IDs on social media if possible. E-mailing these links to your clients and participants is a much more secure method for controlling who you would like to attend.

Avoid using your Personal Meeting ID to host public events. Always generate random meeting IDs when scheduling meetings. Check here for more information on scheduling meetings. You can also set it to where the meeting requires a password to join.

Familiarize yourself with Zoom’s settings and features. Understand how to protect your virtual space. For example, using the Waiting Room feature is helpful for controlling your attendees. Check these links to see the controls for the Hosts and how to manage participants during a Zoom meeting.

Manage Screen Sharing

One of the most important things you’ll want to verify is that screen sharing is limited to hosts only.

In the host controls, click the arrow next to Share Screen and click Advanced Sharing Options.

Under Who can share? choose Only Host.

If you have multiple presenters in your meeting, you can set them to Co-Hosts by opening the Participants window and choosing the More option next to their name and changing their status to Co-Host.

Manage Your Participants

Enable the Waiting Room when scheduling your meetings. The Waiting Room acts as virtual staging area for participants where the Host can let people into the meeting all at once or one at a time. This is a great way to control who has access to view your meeting.

Remove unwanted or disruptive participants. From that Participants menu, you can mouse over a participant’s name, and several options will appear, including Remove. Click that to kick someone out of the 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. Hosts can 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.