Zoom Bombing – What It Is and How to Prevent IT

The term “Zoom bombing” gained notoriety at the start of COVID as our world transitioned online. Unfortunately, people (oftentimes hackers) have learned how to find open meetings and disrupt them. There are protections and ways to prevent a Zoom bombing incident from happening to your meeting. Fortunately, there are several ways to protect your Zoom meetings.

We understand the need to share some of the advanced features with your participants to allow interaction.  Zoom has added some suggestions to mitigate the chance that an unwelcome participant engages in disrupting behavior.

If you share your meeting link on social media or another public location, anyone with the link can join your meeting. You may, however, occasionally require a meeting link (for office hours, for instance) that is open to a broader community. Here are some tips you can use to help when public meeting space is necessary:

Zoom Meetings:

  • Avoid using your Personal Meeting ID (PMI) to host public events. Your PMI is essentially one continuous meeting, and people can pop in and out all the time. Learn more about meeting IDs.
  • Familiarize yourself with Zoom’s settings and features. Understand how to protect your virtual space when you need to. For example, the Waiting Room is a helpful feature for hosts to control who comes and goes.
  • Set up a password. A password adds an additional layer of security, one that may be useful for meetings outside of regular class hours. You may wish to share the password in your syllabus or direct emails to your students or classmates.
  • Disable attendees’ video. Hosts can turn anyone’s video off. This allows them to block unwanted, distracting, or inappropriate gestures on video.
  • Mute participants. Hosts can mute/unmute individual participants or all of them at once to block unwanted, distracting, or inappropriate noise. You can also enable Mute Upon Entry in your settings to reduce confusion in large meetings.

If you need help creating your meeting or need some additional tips on how to secure your event, please reach out to [email protected].

Regards,
Information Technology Department
STETSON UNIVERSITY College of Law
1401 61st Street South | Gulfport, FL 33707
Email: [email protected]  | Office: +1 (727) 562 7323

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