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Keeping Your Zoom Sessions Secure

By this time, I'm sure most people have heard about "Zoombombing", where random (and sometimes not so random) people will enter a Zoom session and try to disrupt it in various ways (note for trivia enthusiasts: the term was first added to Wikipedia on March 28). Hopefully most people have also heard about the many ways to prevent this from happening. Zoom has taken steps to make things more secure by default but I thought it might be helpful to provide a simple round-up of Dos and Don't that you really need to know.

DO secure your session links by using a password and/or requiring registration. For some events (e.g., virtual happy hours that are open to anyone), I know it's easier to just give out a link publicly, but at least ask people to email you for the password.

DON'T use your personal meeting room for public meetings; use a random ID created specifically for your session. 

DO know who is in your session by:

  • Enabling the Waiting Room (and then DON’T admit people you can’t identify). One way to make sure you can identify who is in the waiting room is to require attendees to login.
    PRO TIP: Even if someone is logged in, that doesn't mean they have set up their profile with their actual name. You can customize your waiting room to show a message that only identifiable attendees will be admitted.
  • Locking the meeting once everyone is there. Note that once a meeting is locked, you will not be notified that someone is in the waiting room so don't do this until everyone is there that you expect to be there.
  • Knowing how to remove participants.


DO control what attendees can do by:
  • Restricting screen sharing. This can be changed on the fly if you need to.
  • Restricting annotation and chat tools. Note that you can still allow participants to send chat messages to you, the host, while restricting their ability to broadcast to everyone.
  • Muting all participants (and DON'T let participants unmute themselves). Be sure to show people how to raise their hand when they want to talk.
  • Knowing how to disable video / put participants “on hold”
Doing all these things can't guarantee that there won't still be some disruption but it does make it far less likely, and will ensure you can manage the culprits quickly if n

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